The abundance delusion (gifted link)

Honestly a weird article and I'm not sure how to take it but I'm not a fan. Reading through it, here's some odd choice quotes while I wait for the payoff of the title "Abundance Delusion":

Back in July, following an eight-month fetishization of Luigi Mangione on the far left, another gunman in New York City killed several people, including a mother of two school-age kids who happened to work at—uh-oh—Blackstone. It was, unambiguously, a horrifying tragedy. But on the Luigi Left, reaction to the gruesome murders was not only neutral, or ambivalent, but celebratory, and explicitly supportive of the killer.
This was no small group of crazies, either. Some version of the reaction was shared thousands of times across X, Threads, and Bluesky on the grounds that cartoonish caricatures of “the rich” were, in a sense, physically harming the poor.

So off the bat it does that thing we all love nowadays where it goes "wow look at these people on social media who have very extreme opinions", without really naming who they are or why they would matter. You can find all kinds of extreme takes on social media on anything you want, from serious topics, to flat earthing and vaccine skepticism, down to opinions on food. Are these people in any way influential? Is "shared thousands of times" a high bar to meet? Do these people have any meaningful motivation behind their takes, or is it the same amount of thought I put in when I send out a post about taking my morning dump?

Partly this is because of structural issues innate to our political system, and partly this is because large swaths of the left, which Abundance Dems need to win elections, are actively and often publicly fantasizing about sending Abundance Dems to the guillotine.

Yeah I wonder why they'd want that....

I want a bullet train that rips across the country from San Francisco to New York in half a day. [...] Fuck it, let’s throw in a robot bartender. I want genetically modified hydroponic gardens. I want special economic zones for manufacturing, for rare-earth-metals mining and processing, for rocketry and electric vehicles, and every other high-tech project you can think of, a reality in which Americans are liberated from local regulations that kneecap our industrial output -- [...] I want weather modification. I want geoengineering. I want to terraform Mars into a habitable world. I want a giant “Justice” statue, to complement the East Coast’s “Liberty,” on Alcatraz Island. I want this statue to depict an objectively hot person. Finally, Moon should be a state, and no I won’t be taking any further questions.

I moved to San Francisco in 2011, and discussions of our world “post-scarcity,” or in “superabundance,” were standard among “techno-utopians,” a common media pejorative. Such ideas were shared throughout the Bay Area by optimistic young men and women of every political affiliation. This was the language of AI enthusiasts, of Burning Man libertarians, of effective altruists.

Which turned in to a project to create tech monopolies and oligarchs that then turn around and pay tribute to the current administration.

But what I’m saying is, I hear you. I get it. We’re banking on the openly violent left over MAGA moms who voted for Trump because their preschool teacher told little Sally she might be a man. Also, the eggs were really expensive.

Again, the openly violent left so far seeming to be......random people on twitter and bluesky?

But here's where the article starts making a very strange turn,

Mamdani is a Karl Marx–quoting nepo baby who (after failing to find success as a rapper) just defeated Andrew Cuomo on a platform of government-run grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and rent freezes. Yes, The New York Times would like you to know that democratic socialists aren’t really socialists because they believe in democracy (truly, they argued this). But I was still living in the Haight when our local chapter was holding literal Mao Zedong reading groups as the city hemorrhaged jobs and businesses during the pandemic. Mamdani’s own housing adviser believes private property—and especially housing—is “a weapon of white supremacy” and should all be seized. Oh right, and he has referred to himself as a socialist.

Housing is a major issue for the DSA, and has been for many years. But the DSA’s focus is, as one would expect from an openly socialist party, radical: the elimination of all misdemeanor offenses and the closure of all jails; opposition to homeless shelters in favor of government banks to finance government housing (also known as free one-bedroom apartments), which the public will fund forever, for anyone who wants it, including every drug addict in every city in the country; tenant rights to the point that eviction is functionally impossible; and opposition to market-rate housing construction on the grounds that it leads to gentrification. In other words, these people are the actual reason we can’t have nice things.

[...] Or, who knows, maybe the Abundance Dems truly did convert him. But my sense is that he’s just looking for rhetorical cover from the center left to make his actual Marxism more palatable to people who aren’t insane, and the center left is beginning to accept him because their only other choices are a loser criminal and a loser pervert. That means, yet again, the crazy local Democrats are playing the thoughtful wonkish local Democrats, not the other way around. The thing is, I’ve already seen this movie, back in San Francisco, and I can tell you with some confidence: The socialists are lying.

Nobody wants the label of “NIMBY,” and not even the far left wants to leave the impression that it stands in the way of new construction. It’s just that the far left defines affordable housing as 100-percent-government-subsidized housing for poor people, and they will dutifully stand in the way of everything else.

But then it ratchets up even more,

You need policies that make building easier. You need to kill policies that make building more expensive. And then you have to build.

Fortunately, we do have examples of American men who prioritized building.

Robert Moses was born in 1888,

Uh huh,

This one man completely reshaped New York City, and he is the last American who ever effected this degree of material change in our country. Probably, there should be a holiday in his honor. But, as we are living in the clown world, he’s incredibly controversial—especially on the left.

If you haven't heard of Robert Moses by the way, here's a choice quote from "The Power Broker",

“Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.

Back to the article,

He bulldozed entire neighborhoods when necessary, and he built.

I wonder which neighborhoods.....which commonalities you'd find.....

Liberal values might be reduced to something like democracy, equality, and progress. But the far left’s definition of progress is primarily social—in that democracy, or the performance of democracy, along with material equality, by which the far left means a flattening of outcomes, are more greatly prized than material change. And progress defined as something more like material change—meaningful change that improves the lives of everyone, permanently—is impossible without hierarchy, vision, and power. This means, first, that the left’s values are fundamentally in conflict, which is how we so often wind up having conversations about, for example, the cost of a bus ride in New York, which Mamdani believes should be free.

I wouldn't say that at all and I'm not sure at all why the author thinks so.

Wonks who value the existence of the subway understand that more revenue—like, say, the millions of dollars annually that come from rider fares—means more resources for ride improvement and policing, which increases ridership, which in turn keeps the entire system alive.

The MTA's budget is public by the way, you can look up the details. Fares contribute 26% of the budget in 2024, dedicated taxes provide 44%, and in an interesting turn, 13% of the budget comes from tolls of all places.

I looked up the budget for the TTC to get a comparison of another city, and in Toronto the passenger revenue accounts for 38% of the total, with "City Funding" accounting for 49%.

More honest wonks will even admit that a slight barrier of entry improves the ride dramatically for most people. But the far left fundamentally does not care about this. Ideologically, its adherents do not believe that an amazing transit system that only an overwhelming majority of people can afford is preferable to a grossly degraded system that everyone, technically, can access. This belief extends to roads, housing, schools, everything.

There is no slight barrier of entry, people hop the turnstiles all the time. They've put in new turnstiles with paddles, I doubt it's going to do anything. They've put spikes at the top of the turnstile machine to discourage people grabbing on them to hop it, again I doubt that's doing anything. The worst thing they did was make the emergency exits locked until you press the bar forward for some absurd amount of time, to discourage people exiting through those exits, or letting people in. In the end I think desperate people will just crawl under, over, or scrounge up the 3$ to sleep on the train for the entire day, it's not much of a barrier.

Abundance is not a democratic project. Abundance inherently requires authority, and accepting trade-offs that are very much at odds with the socialist project, or at least as that project is currently imagined by American socialists. In the U.S.S.R., they did—you really have to give it to them—have infrastructure. They just also had the Holodomor. But Democrats will need to pick a lane here, the endless performance of “democracy” in every aspect of our lives, or building shit that works.

So now we move on to "remember communist atrocities" while ignoring like, any of the other ones from this country over its history.

There's a paragraph in there about the Empire State Building's construction and how we just can't build anymore, and saying Biden's infrastructure bill didn't set out to do anything, with a link that's funnily enough a 404.

But the reality is that the Democratic base isn’t actually voting for abundance. The voters who make up the backbone of the party, representing everything from government and private-sector unions to NGOs, are voting for steady work paid at a bloated premium (and in perpetuity for those lucky enough to score a pension), not to fix any of the problems their jobs ostensibly exist to solve. We have the country we have today because this is what the voters requested. This is democracy.

Feel like that's implying that dem voters are only freeloading government types who just want to enrich themselves, which feels like a massive overstep to paint the whole voting base as that.

This means that even if Abundance libs are somehow able to survive an alliance with the Luigi Left, which will never—I’m really very sorry—ever take orders from Ezra Klein, they will still have to contend with the fact that nobody in any position of power, be they Democrat or Republican, is structurally incentivized by our political system to build.

Now this part I agree with, I don't believe abundance libs are actually going to accomplish much beneficial.

Abundance Democrats can have abundance or they can be popular in Brooklyn, but they can’t have both, which is why my sense today is that the movement is made up entirely of well-meaning but hopelessly naive optimists, and very clever propagandists who understand that the project is hopeless, but communists need better branding.

And look, “Abundance!” is a good brand. Or, it’s better than cheering for murder. But the brand alone can’t build a bullet train, and if the socialists win, there won’t be any bullet train fast enough to save us.

Which funnily enough, man fuck this guy.

If you're wondering who he is by the way, I didn't recognize the name,

As right-leaning tech investor Mike Solana put it on X: “And so, as foretold, the great tech right/populist right-wing schism of 2025 begins.”

I reached out to Mike Solana, one of the most insightful (and irreverent) voices in tech right now, to explain what Dorsey’s resignation means.

Mike is a vice president at Founders Fund—Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, which has invested in transformative brands like AirBnB, Stripe, and Lyft—and he writes one of the sharpest, punchiest, funniest Substacks in all the metaverse: Pirate Wires. — BW

So a Peter Thiel associated tech guy who, here's an article with The American Conservative where he says how he only loves America and wants to see it's expansion: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-thought-of-american-greatness/

In terms of foreign intervention, there are people who see horror in every American act abroad. This reeks of ideology to me, and I am no longer an ideological person. For me, there’s just one question I ask before I make my mind up about a policy, whether here or anywhere around the world: does this help us? If it helps us, I am in favor. If it neither helps nor hurts us, I am ambivalent, and lean against action. If it hurts us, I am against. And increasingly I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone could see it any other way.