To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and

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.

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.