Pun Salad

This was kind of a frustrating read for me. It's a mixture of very good observations and very poor recommendations. The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, note that various roadblocks stand in the way of their imagined utopia (visions of plentiful housing, lots of green energy, affordable health care, high-speed rail, etc.) And the good observation is that a lot of those roadblocks have been set up by the Blue Team: endless environmental reviews, restrictive zoning, onerous regulation, nuclear energy phobia, diversity mandates, etc.) Klein and Thompson also steadfastly oppose the "degrowthers" on the left; they are all for increasing the size of the economic pie, spurring innovation, invention, and research, so good for them.

Ah, but Klein and Thompson are huge fans of hands-on good government directing all this. Just not bad government. I am unconvinced they can tell one from another. "Hayek" does not appear in the book's index. Neither does "Solyndra". They don't talk about incentives much. They are frustrated by the escalating costs, endless delays, and shrinking scope of California's high-speed rail project, but they never seem to draw the obvious conclusion that maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place. They are also True Believers in Climate Change Catastrophe, something that even Bill Gates has moved away from.

There's a certain amount of selective amnesia involved, too. Back in the day, Klein was an enthusiastic cheerleader for ObamaCare. Memorably claiming that Joe Lieberman, a conscientious objector in the original debate, was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Never mind the present-day reality that ObamaCare failed its goal of "bending the cost curve"; we've has moved on to designing the next Big Plan That Will Solve Everything. (And if you don't go along, it's probably because you want to kill hundreds of thousands of people.)

All this is accompanied by a lot of sweet, gauzy rhetoric. Designed (successfully) to appeal to "progressive" readers who push policy books onto the best-seller lists, while only making minor quibbles about their bankrupting philosophies. So: read for the good stuff, ignore the road-to-serfdom cheerleading for big government.