Liberty and Abundance

Proposing a bipartisan alliance to break the Scarcity Cartel

Liberty and Abundance

Proposing a bipartisan alliance to break the Scarcity Cartel

The Land of Opportunity

There are as many American dreams as there are Americans. But the dreams that inspired people from all over the world to journey to the United States share an essential, common image: America as the Land of Opportunity. To immigrants of the past or future, and to Americans seeking their fortune far from where they were born, America represents both vast resources and the freedom to make the most of them. Every American Dream involves access, agency, and a frontier of self-creation where the two meet. America, in its most romantic imagination, is defined by Liberty and Abundance.

Liberty and Abundance cannot be cleanly separated; in fact, they’re mutually constitutive. At best, the dialectic of Liberty and Abundance powers an overflowing flywheel — one generation’s liberty produces a flush of abundance, and then the next generation uses that abundance to build further resources for liberty. Thomas Edison, in an abundant society, had the liberty to tinker with new inventions; he invents a lightbulb; decades later, in a small town out west, a young man stays up all night reading, freshly electrified, until he has a eureka moment of his own. Liberty requires abundance to burn; abundance requires liberty to alight.

The Founders knew that this generative fusion of Liberty and Abundance promotes prosperity and progress. Jefferson and Hamilton came at it from completely different angles, but converged in recognizing the essential role that material conditions play in cultivating the independence of citizens and a nation.

Jefferson’s ideal of the self-sovereign yeoman farmer required a massive amount of land to be made accessible and affordable to common citizens — so he broke his own strict constitutionalist principles in order to purchase the Louisiana territory from Napoleon, double the size of the country, and give ordinary citizens the resource most essential for abundance. This democratized access to land for American citizens in a way that radically departed from Europe’s feudal history, at the expense, however, of indigenous Americans. Hamilton, after writing a long essay like this, formed a company called the “Society for the Establishment for Useful Manufactures,” a proto-example of a public-private project to build new cities (notably, Paterson, New Jersey, which the company founded at the falls of the Passaic) focused on making domestic manufacturing a national priority to secure economic independence from England.

Both of these Founders’ dreams acknowledged that the federal government can be useful for securing the conditions of liberty and abundance. Throughout American history, many of our finest periods of progress followed from governance that balances the fusion. Lincoln’s Republican Party of the 1860s created the transcontinental railroad, land-grant colleges, and the Homestead Act — these are Liberty-and-Abundance policies that created conditions for Free Labor to flourish.

That young man out west I mentioned wouldn’t have seen a light bulb turn on in time for his eureka moment if it weren’t for FDR’s 1935 Rural Electrification Administration. The ever-broadening shared prosperity represented by the high-wage worker, the GI Bill beneficiary, and the homeowner became the basis of American dynamism through our mid-20th century glory. Though that prosperity was not shared equally across race lines and other divisions, the flywheel was spinning in the right direction, and on the whole liberty and abundance increased and slowly spread. It made us freer, richer, more creative, and more democratic.

But since then, in the lives of those living today, something happened. Liberty and abundance decoupled. The flywheel seized up.

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Breaking the Scarcity Cartel

Every American today knows this strange feeling — that nagging sense that everything takes longer, costs more, and produces less than it should. Our supposedly independent citizens can’t afford housing, and though we once built a train across the continent, now we can’t even build one halfway across California. We live in the wealthiest nation in history, but we can’t seem to make things anymore. The gains from productivity began to spread more and more slowly from the 1970s onwards. The positive-sum culture of an expanding pie increasingly gave way to zero-sum competition over a pie that appeared baked and ready to be divided. A scarcity mindset is toxic to liberty, toxic to abundance, and toxic to the kind of cooperation and culture that democracy requires.

Without realizing it, we replaced a Liberty-and-Abundance republic with a Permission-and-Scarcity republic. Permission is what liberty becomes when it can be granted only by gatekeepers, rather than exercised by citizens. Scarcity is what abundance becomes when it’s hoarded by incumbents, rather than reinvested to compound for the next generation.

Permission-and-Scarcity has become its own political project in modern America — across the political spectrum, a wide range of actors have, for different reasons, found it useful to keep things scarce. Homeowners want housing scarce. Incumbent utilities want grid interconnection scarce. Established firms want competition scarce. Permitting lawyers want permits scarce. There is a NIMBY left and a NIMBY right.

These people have understandable reasons, individually, for pursuing their various forms of regulatory capture and rent-seeking. And of course, some regulations that protect health, safety, and the environment are important and necessary, even if they make it harder to build things; but when the sum total effect of regulations layered over decades is that we can barely build anything, and certain special interests have an incentive to maintain their form of scarcity at the expense of everyone else, then we have a problem that both the left and the right acknowledge.

All these actors rarely think of themselves as allies, but they share a political-economic interest in maintaining scarcity; over time, as they’ve carved off more of the pie, the net result has set off a negative flywheel of Permission-and-Scarcity that’s hobbled American agency.

Call it the Scarcity Cartel. The Scarcity Cartel has an asymmetric advantage over the Liberty-and-Abundance coalition it (implicitly) opposes, because the actors involved have concentrated spheres of power and are conscious of their clear personal interest; meanwhile, the benefits of the Abundance flywheel are more diffuse, because although most people benefit from highways and the Manhattan Project, the relationships are not as immediate, obvious, or tied to one’s next paycheck. The compounding value of restarting the virtuous flywheel becomes clear only in the next generation.

What’s needed is a cross-partisan Liberty-and-Abundance coalition to become politically conscious of itself, in order to break the cross-partisan Scarcity Cartel.

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Liberty and Abundance Zones

I believe that the seeds of a modern Liberty-and-Abundance fusion are already beginning to converge on the ground.

From the Libertarian Right, the idea of “Freedom Cities” has gained real momentum in recent years — Silicon Valley startup “Founders” are looking to create things more ambitious than mere companies, Congressional Republicans have signalled that they would like to pass a bill creating special economic zones to develop essential American manufacturing capabilities, and the White House has made the vibe a priority with an eye toward a potential executive order.

Meanwhile, the nascent Abundance Left is looking for concrete ways to demonstrate its theory of politics — ways to experiment with responsible permitting reform, build dense, affordable, sustainable mixed-zoned communities, invest in rapid scientific research capabilities, and fast-track renewable energy projects. It seems like the Freedom Cities vessel provides a natural opportunity for Abundance ideas to be tested, shared, and deployed at scale — perhaps there’s an alliance to be forged here.

On Capitol Hill, these seeds are taking root, coalescing concretely around a piece of prospective legislation to create “Liberty and Abundance Zones,” aka “LAB Zones.” LAB Zones would be place-based sandboxes where Americans can experiment with streamlined permitting, flexible land use, and innovative governance so that they can really build things. They’d be hubs of productivity innovation where we can experiment with new approaches to domestic manufacturing, develop important new real-world technologies, and build abundant supplies of housing and energy. If a federal bill is too complicated, it might also make sense to start with state-level LAB Zone bills in friendly places like Colorado. The physical frontier might have closed in 1890, but with LAB Zones, we could crack open enough space for the chain reaction of Liberty and Abundance to catch fire again.

We will, of course, need compromise to craft good policy for LAB Zones and ensure that they avoid the failure modes of the extremes on either side. On one pole is the extreme of Thielosphere projects like Praxis — they want to create Freedom Cities outside of America, corporate/charter cities in places like Greenland where they can pursue liberty as exit from America, exit from democracy and the nation. On the other pole we have all the failure modes that come with top-down planning, whether by company-town capitalists or centralized industrial policy statists. Both the accelerationist right and the abundance left sometimes display a lack of appetite for democracy; but if we are able to avoid the pitfalls of both horseshoe poles, and fuse novel governance innovations with these new experiments, there is a real opportunity here to create true “laboratories of democracy,” as our federal system was designed to promote.

Luckily, the farthest-along prototype of what a new American city project might look like is already beginning to blaze a middle path. ProtoTown — recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg — has been quietly building a radical new hub for hardware manufacturing in the pro-building, purple-blossoming land south of Austin, Texas. In ProtoTown, over a dozen startups are tinkering freely with hard tech, trying to solve some of our real-world problems the old-fashioned way. A couple of kids are experimenting with a new kind of desalination centrifuge to address our water crisis; someone is working on a special solar panel that cools water, and someone else founded a company that can mass-produce ADUs on the land using local adobe. Meanwhile, a reactor that will produce isotopes for nuclear medicine research is set to go from greenfield to splitting atoms in under 10 months — that’s Manhattan Project speed. That’s liberty and abundance, reunited. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with ProtoTown on and off over the years, most notably by driving their big red school bus.)

Though ProtoTown is itself a startup, rolling together acres of privately owned ranchland, it eschews both top-down control and fantasies of democratic exit. Instead, it has aligned itself remarkably well with local, state, and national support in order to build a prototype of what a new city project committed to American national renewal might look like in practice, inspiring us to create other experiments along wider frameworks. This new model is an opportunity to fuse the best of Liberty and Abundance with democratic legitimacy and a sense of national responsibility. Perhaps, if we seed other experiments around the country, we can innovate new ways of building and living together, while reinspiring the sense that America is the Land of Opportunity.

I would like to see the Abundance Left and the Libertarian Right come together to hammer out the details on a framework for LAB Zones at both the state and federal level. We don’t have to know in advance what will happen; we just have to craft sandboxes where experiments can take place. We will, of course, keep certain safeguards — conversations about novel ways to integrate labor, environmental, and community fairness considerations will be essential to making this experiment workable, and truly American rather than merely libertarian. But if we want innovation then we’ll need to loosen our belts a bit. This will involve a little bit of faith — the thing about freedom is that we often cannot, in advance, know what its fruits will be. But the converse problem here is that a risk-averse society, which requires every experiment to be safely predicted and permitted in advance, precludes certain possibilities of progress which can only emerge as organic surprises in the uncertain process of experience. Better to take a bet on American creativity than acquiesce to managed decline by default.

Perhaps these contained experiments could become internal combustion engines of innovation, restarting the virtuous flywheel like a guy pulling the starter cord of an old lawnmower as hard as he can. Perhaps those who value the American Dream can unite, break the Scarcity Cartel, and help build an America with liberty and abundance for all.

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If you enjoyed this, you can read two final philosophical sections on “The Lacuna of Justice” and “American Pragmatism” in the original version of the essay published on Beatin’ Paths:

Liberty and Abundance