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.