- Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or decades late, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures rather than fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.
To unmake this machine will be painful. It’s also necessary.
Derek Thompson, co-author on the book this article served as a prologue for, I found way more grounded. Anyone remotely interested in this article has a healthy chance of a whisper about the presser he and Ezra made. Derek’s appearing on Andrew Yang’s platform was better than most the rest of the tour, and his lighting up CNBC post-Liberation Day put the shade in schadenfreude.
So wait is the answer "build high speed rail?" Is the answer "strike down regulation?" Is the answer "build more housing?" 'cuz it sure looks like Ezra Klein is arguing for State Capitalism: 'cuz there's a flip side to that. In fact, I wonder what 2006 Ezra Klein would say to 2025 Ezra Klein about giant government projects of limited utility. Arguing that California ought to imitate Texas building codes is certainly... a take. California's building codes used to be a lot more lax; how'd that work out? The problem with high speed rail in California isn't trying to make the air breathable for brown people, it's the fact that California is a wretched den of graft and corruption. California has higher sales taxes, higher property taxes and income taxes where Washington doesn't, yet the roads are shit, the government is strapped and nobody answers your call because California is breathtakingly corrupt. This is actually more common in highly-concentrated regions which tend to lean Democratic. Nobody ever talks about the Texas mafia. New York? Chicago? Los Angeles? Organized crime tends to be where the people are. Those people, of course, are now moving to where the people aren't because - as Ezra Klein says - it's too fucking expensive to live there anymore. Most nations deal with this problem through government-subsidized housing but of course that requires, you know, socialism. Gonna be interesting watching all the red states square individual determinism with shrinking coastlines, dropping water tables and rising temperatures via Texas-style building codes but maybe Ezra can ask Gavin Newsom's opinion on that later. I mean, not only did he stick his dick in Kim Guilfoyle multiple times he put a ring on it which makes him a centrist, I guess. The liberal answer to right wing populism was left wing populism. Its name was Bernie Sanders and the Democrats successfully defeated it. As a consequence, the Democratic Party survived. The Republicans failed to defeat right wing populism and the result was the effective death of the Republican Party. Now - it's not hard to argue that the Democratic Party needs to die, too. They sure AF need to learn where their fucking votes come from, rather than just their donation dollars. They don't come from "tear down building codes." You wanna see how fucked up the regard for infrastructure is? - Congestion pricing is disapproved nearly 2:1 in NYC (47% disapprove, 27% approve) - But congestion pricing is believed to have lowered commutes and congestion nearly 2:1 (47% agree, 27% disagree) - Congestion pricing should be kept by a nearly 10% margin (59% keep) You wanna see how to win votes? It's not rocket science. It's "kindness and handouts." If you wanna get wonky, it's "kindness and handouts that I don't have to pay for." "Make America more like Texas and/or China" is nowhere on that agenda, no matter how far up his own ass Ezra Klein crawls.In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.
You've actually mixed up the approval numbers for congestion pricing. It is 47% disapprove, 27% approve for voters statewide. Actual residents of the city (57% support, 36% oppose), and those who travel to the city by public transit and by car all currently approve. As usual, the people experiencing the benefits of this policy firsthand are mostly in favor, whereas the far-flung upstate residents are just basing their opinions on media propaganda.
To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and The reason I shared this is because to me, it represents a line of thinking I keep seeing more and more on the left: deregulating to enable growth and progress. This is/was in my mind a sternly right-wing idea. Deregulation still is, but I hear calls for reforming regulation more and more from the left, not the right. As a government bureaucrat myself now, I'm noticing I'm becoming more receptive to the idea that a rainforest of well intentioned regulations can ultimately make it too hard, too expensive, or even impossible to build things or make things work. We have been adding hurdles and my impression is that it wouldn't hurt less than the status quo to have the pendulum swing the other way for a while. I'm not under the illusion that it will reduce grift and corruption. The DOGE bulldozer is arguably the purest distillation of said corruption. Now I'm also not blind to the advantages that have been made in the past decades through regulatory improvements/additions. I am however keenly aware (slash worried) that we have lost focus away from what gets us to better results and instead have put too much focus on improving the process instead. The price per mile of new rail (from high speed to local tram tracks) varies wildly. It's not just because of corruption, not just because of technical differences, but for a significant part it is the regulatory process that takes an ungodly amount of paperwork to wade through. An example over here is the Friesenbrücke. A single, rural railway bridge got hit by a cargo ship in 2015, the primary railway corridor between the Netherlands and Germany in that area. After eight years it's demolished. The estimated date of finishing construction is this year, so more than a decade after it was hit. It was first estimated to cost €48M, later €66M; now, the total costs have ballooned to well over €200M. The slowness and expensiveness was because it had to comply with more laws and requirements than a simple replacement. On the one hand, that's great, now you've accidentally made this bridge future-proof. On the other hand, it is now par for the course now that these kinds of projects balloon in time and money. We shrug and go "oh well that's just what infrastructure is these days". But the more expensive it is to do anything, the less we do of it, there's no way around it. We used to have multiple large rail projects ongoing at any time. December marked the first time the Netherlands has zero new rail being built for a while - everything we do is replacing or removing existing infrastructure. I think the two are related.The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.
That's bait'n'switch, though. He can say "politics of abundance" but his whole schtick is "let's deregulate everything and run it like the place with no building codes." i've bitched about the simplistic YIMBY impression of building codes before - the general millennial/GenZ impression of building codes is that "they are things that prevent me from getting what I want." Fuckin'A bubba they exist so that your KIDS can still get the shit THEY will want. Look - wanna see what a steering column looked like when I grew up? It's perfect in its execution. You put on your lap belt so that you will pivot into it with all the leverage available. The spokes holding the rim are phenolic on a thin metal armature so they will break away with minimal force. And the structure of the device is a piece of inch and a half steel pipe held in place by structural reinforcement and a u-joint capable of withstanding a ton of force. If you want to stake a driver like he's Nosferatu, you can't beat a '60s era Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Volkswagen/Volvo/Everything every fucking car was like this. let's deregulate some shit tho I grew up BREATHING more lead than everyone was whingeing about in Flint. Like, by a factor of 5. We all did. Asbestos? I HAZ it. A friend had giant sheets of the stuff. But we were talking building codes. Hey, hey, I have an example there, too, who knew. See where it says "A"? That's a culvert in my 1970 electrical as-built. Back when the house was put in, there was a 24" culvert under the road, which was elevated compared to the properties around it. This is rather novel as the road is no longer elevated - they backfilled six feet of dirt on either side back in '86 (and buried my electrical box). And what was a culvert on the other side of the street is now a lawn. Wanna see something awesome? That blue line in the middle of the frame is a "drainage basin" boundary. My property is the big square to the left of it. You'll notice that stormwater goes every direction away from my property... but that culvert is nowhere in evidence. Now - my city considers my property to include a 'wetland.' It's not demarcated as such but we all know that were I to ask the state, they'd go "yup, wetland" immediately. That's because there's a permanent year-round pond in it. No bugs! Relatively clean water! But for a drainage basin, and a "critical wetland" (their words) it's awfully mysterious. But last Thursday I continued my War Against The Blackberries and found the source of the Nile: That's after digging at it for 20 minutes and getting out some of the purest clay I've ever seen... 'cuz all the sand has been filtered out over 50 years. Dunno what the other side looks like, don't know where it goes, but that's what a 24" conduit forgotten to time looks like. What's super-cool is after digging it out we got a bunch of rain, and now half my lake is full of muddy water. half of it. Because water pressure is now blowing out a mountain of clay and emptying it into my pond. I'll be at it for years, I imagine, but slowly and steadily the drainage in that "drainage basin" is going to actually drain. LET'S PUT SOME REGULATION ON IT When I first found the Source of the Nile I took a picture of it and walked it down to city hall. I'm on a first name basis with the city planner by now and I wanted to show him how bright red it was. "That's a lot of iron bacteria," he said. I agreed. I asked what interest the City had in my un-fucking my culvert because it seemed to me that while it's a wetland, it's in everyone's best interests for me to practice some stewardship. He looked at me and gestured me over to the "official" window. Yep, it's that kinda place. He there informed me that while he is legally responsible for the shoreline, anything that is ever covered by water is considered a "navigable waterway" and is the purvey of the state. My move is to (A) call the state, wait for them to get back to me, find out if they consider it a local, state or national jurisdictional issue, and if state, wait ten months, fill out at least eight forms, get a 90 day window to respond to all requests and carry out any work I may need to carry out or if national, hope the person responsible for addressing my request hasn't been laid off by the Trump administration. If they say it's local, I can do whatever the fuck I want, he only cares about the shoreline. "Or," I said, "maybe I'll find the solution I need without doing anything." "If I don't know about it I can't report it," he said. HERE'S THE THING, THOUGH That neighborhood floods. And it floods because there's no flood control. And there's no flood control because the culvert was buried in 1986. And if I run it up the flagpole, this discrepancy is going to come to light and probably unleash a ten year bajillion dollar flood remediation extravaganza. Or it would, if the agencies responsible for this shit hadn't been so starved for cash that it now takes ten months to get an answer to "can I clean out my culvert." The regulations are pretty clear - so long as I'm not running a hydro plant I'm good to go. But this is an area that should get reviewed. But it won't. Because here's the move: 1) Decry the situation 2) Regulate the shit out of it 3) Starve the shit out of the regulators 4) Declare that business is the only solution Do you see where the bait'n'switch happens? Do you see Ezra Klein's part in it? Everyone hates the IRS. They take away your money. The solution for a fairer IRS is, ironically, more IRS agents. Then they won't go after the easy prey they'll go after the big game. Picking up nickels? That's easy. Robbing a bank? that requires planning and for a generation we've been arguing that the way to success is make sure no government agency has the manpower to do more than pick up nickels and then we bitch about how regulations are bad. I see your Friesenbrucke and raise you a Key Bridge.To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and
The caveat being "unless no one else wants to play at that price?" That's not how the WPA worked. One of my go-to housewarming gifts used to be "look up the house in the historic register and get a framed photo of it that was taken in 1936." Government hired painters, playwrights, photographers, actors, whatever. Like, we had Jackson Pollack on the payroll. What's really funny is I recall you being all in on Trump's whole "no buildings unless they look like Rome" thing and there is zero classic architecture built by anyone other than government. We've seen this show before - when it requires railroad baron money to build railroads, you end up with barons.
Hypothetical: A Democrat strategist approaches you and says Mr Blue we have been very appreciative of your donations over the years and we would like to hear your proposals of what we could do to make the Democratic party more appealing to the average voter. What are some things you think we could advocate for in the House and Senate and in public to help our image with the American middle class/working particularly those in rural areas? If we pretend that someone was listening, what would you tell them?
I would tell them the Green New Deal remains incredibly popular. I would tell them there are hundreds of issues where Democratic policies are incredibly popular. I would tell them that 80% of conservatives approve of legalized medical marijuana. But all of that would require the Dianne Feinstein Wing to relinquish power. Here's the thing, though. Nobody ran Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Nobody ran Maxwell Frost. Progress advances one funeral at a time. The kids who can't afford to raise a home in Silicon Valley but can afford Selma, Alabama aren't gonna suddenly start fretting about transgender chickens. We're already seeing a demographic shift from it. I volunteered for Kerry. It was an utter and total shitshow. That was after establishment Dems let the Supreme Court give the election to Bush and after establishment Dems decided to murder Howard Dean's chances. I don't think anybody gives a fuck about Obama if the candidate who loses in 2004 is Howard Dean. That the Democrats lost to Donald Trump despite the fact that he was absolutely, positively, undeniably Donald Trump should factor into everything they do from here on out. Will it? I don't know.
I think first of all, you need to shut up and listen to your public. The stuff they’re worried about are things you used to be all about solving before you decided to sell out and be the party of the laptop class, various identity groups, and elite college graduates. These are very meat and potatoes issues: wage stagnation, affordable housing, affordable college, grocery prices, good basic education for their kids. If you had a good speaker, with a message that “we will actually fix these things. We actually believe in helping the working adult population to succeed in America. We want to have standards of living increase instead of decrease. “. Then when elected actually make those things better. Banning VCs and investment firms from buying residential homes would be a quick, cheap and easy fix to at least part of the housing crisis. Entire neighborhoods being bought up — unseen, and above asking prices in some cases— reduce supply. There are stories of these kinds of things happening even to trailer parks. A VC comes in, buys the park, jacks up rents until nobody can afford to remain. It’s insane.
The root of Ezra’s core messaging generally cones to come from a good place. There’s something about his delivery that doesn’t seem to land right. I’ve lived in red states my whole life. While there are nuggets of truth to this, the overworn dichotomy of “Blue State Overregulation vs. Red State Deregulated Builder’s Paradise” doesn’t fit across the nation. Building codes vary by state and region based on appetite for disaster management as well. The Florida Keys’ building codes are kinda the gold standard for hurricane-proofing homes, but not all of those standards are applied even across the state. […] There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success. Back to the original point… Take the above excerpts, a great through-line ahead of the final two paragraphs quoted in this initial post would be drawing a clearer line of the liberals’ “past mistakes” as inducing scarcity by lack of labor investments. Make it [1] easy for as many citizens as interested to [2] gain the tools (skills)/dignity (debt-free) to do a job, [3] guide project investments while streamlining regulations around the job requirements. How exactly the left should go about it at this moment is a bit of a tougher answer. Without flipping seats in the special elections coming up… dunno, but there a lot of ex-Federal employees with presumably a lot of institutional knowledge out of work now. An opportunity for tackling [1] and [2] may be a bit if a pipe dream at the moment, but it’s an opportunity. A lot of what’s happening is making me wonder if scarcity as the status quo is what it will take for the left to do more. I hope not. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.
Neither Musk nor Trump seeks a more capable state; they seek a broken state that they can control and corrupt.
Ezra Klein is a concern troll. He has never not been. He is the Republican Lolbrooks. His message is "I'm a big booster of liberals so why do they keep doing all these liberal things." I'm sure David Brooks is a nice guy, too, and I'm equally sure his heart is in the right place. His mind, however, is very much about arranging what he sees in order to make his '60s Republican ideology work. Ezra Klein? Dude wants to go back to Clinton SO HARD and I mean, why not. Scarcity. Scarcity is why not. You're absolutely right - rebuilding a strong labor economy is absolutely the right thing to do. The Democrats have fucked up so badly that the president of the Teamsters spoke at the fuckin' RNC. Reducing inequality is another great way to reduce scarcity. Hey, how have the Democrats been doing on that See that jaggedy bit where the income share almost started to pull back? That's Black Monday. 'how bout that bit where it beelines for the sky again? (who had two thumbs and a wife on the board of Walmart?) I voted for Clinton. Twice! he was absolutely the best choice available. But he also fucking gutted the American Dream in deference to Wall Street. You wanna know when the Dems went corporate, it was under Clinton. He basically stole the Republican mojo and left them with Newt Gingrich. But it turns out that opening the world to free trade and offshoring everything so hard that even the metrics changed is bad for the proletariat! So sure. Let's build some trains. Only... the United States is unique in the world in that we have private track and public trains running on it which is the main reason amtrak has never made money. Most of the world does it the other way... except the UK, which took its rail system from pride-of-the-world to laughing-stock through the simple act of privatization. Hey, maybe some giant public works projects! Kinda like... Oh I dunno There's other ways to do it, of course. I hear Ezra Klein is big on state capitalism! Here's the thing, man. scarcity is real. You wanna see when the 'boomers got all their ideas? It's from back when Concordes made sense. It's when all the resources of the world were piped into the United States from literally everywhere else and American manufacturing was the gold standard for the world. And we could absolutely get there again. the United States has an unparalleled amount of natural resources, a highly-skilled labor force and economic protections to build a robust middle class. But all that shit was built by the government. Regulating private industry. To protect the people from its worst impulses while also providing protections to allow it to flourish. Which is why the business douches rescued Hayek and Mises from Austrian ignominy, propped up Milton Friedman and argued that corporations don't owe the public shit. Sure. Let's deregulate it all. What could go wrong? That's the wrong question, though. The right question is "what does deregulation have to do with jobs." 'cuz it's totally fucking unnecessary.
While attempting to wrap my head around why Ezra doesn’t land as well as I’d hoped, lolbrooks was exactly what came to mind… lol. A new king is crowned. Thanks for the rabbithole on income share versus union membership of top 1% (seriously). I have a reading list on the opening up of China starting with the Carter Admin and I’ll keep this graph in mind with as I start looking more seriously at the policy transitions from Carter to Reagan to Clinton (plus where NAFTA plays into it). Will be a bit to catch up, ‘cos only reading non-fiction at any given time is a bore. Shout-out to Scott Lynch for getting me through the Gilded Age reading so far. The fights in court as Zeldin’s EPA tries to wrangle back already-dispensed funds under the allegations of criminal wrongdoing on the side of the last administration (lol?) is one hell of a way to try and stop further progress by a government back initiative like CHIPS. Everyone my algos are tuned to are trying to read the tea leaves on what percentage make-up of 1890s, 1930s or 1960s our future holds, but it all looks like these labor-first policies will be on hold until who knows when (read: if a rebuke gains any traction… as tired as that sounds). Re: other ways to do it that was meant for the people whose government purpose built/funded abundance for them. As for the PWA, I love this statement from the Wiki: Specifically due to the implication of pivoting from deploying local labor for installation/long-term maintenance of fiber to launching more satellites. Why put money in pockets of people across the nation while promoting general welfare with secure underground lines when you could just launch more satellites from a concentrated supply-chain? Something something... atmospheric cooling and Kessler syndrome or whatever… The PWA spent over $7 billion on contracts with private construction firms that did the actual work. It created an infrastructure that generated national and local pride in the 1930s and is still vital nine decades later.
Post some shit dawg because I made the mistake of grinding through the Fleet of Worlds books which required me to acknowledge that there are actually like four books set on Ringworld and while I knew the second one was bad I am absolutely gobsmacked by how horrible the third and fourth one are. The thing that strikes me about every move by the Trump administration so far is they're amateurish. They presume that if they kick the table the leg will fall. There's no greater strategy than "through executive privilege we will dismantle the government for we have Supremes supporting the Unitary Executive Theory." They make a lot of headlines and they're ruining a lot of shit... but they're ruining the shit people like. A whole goddamn country gets to learn what USAID does besides providing the CIA cover. Discover that their tax dollars really do empty the outhouse at Funacres National Park. Find out how much worse Social Security workers are when there are fewer of them. It's an impressively self-determined punitive civics lesson. sigh Look. It annoys me to do this. This book pisses me off the same way my vulnerability to homeopathic remedies does. it is without rigor. Among its examples it literally goes 'oops our model misses the Civil War.' But there are aspects of sociology to it that I haven't seen anywhere else. And if nothing else, it'll show you where Steve Bannon and the rest of the accelerationists are coming from. Will be a bit to catch up, ‘cos only reading non-fiction at any given time is a bore. Shout-out to Scott Lynch for getting me through the Gilded Age reading so far.
The fights in court as Zeldin’s EPA tries to wrangle back already-dispensed funds under the allegations of criminal wrongdoing on the side of the last administration (lol?) is one hell of a way to try and stop further progress by a government back initiative like CHIPS.
Everyone my algos are tuned to are trying to read the tea leaves on what percentage make-up of 1890s, 1930s or 1960s our future holds, but it all looks like these labor-first policies will be on hold until who knows when (read: if a rebuke gains any traction… as tired as that sounds).
I do not want America to become China. But I do want it to be able to build trains. This is an awkward time to make this argument. Above reminded me of below. Which, scratches the surface of the difference between China and America’s labor + manufacturing states. Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.
When Americans complain about how long it takes to build a building or repair a road, authorities often reply that “Rome was not built in a day.” Someone clearly forgot to tell the Chinese. By 2005, the country was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s Rome every two weeks. 29 Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement than the US did in the entire twentieth century. 30 In 2011, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days. 31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.