I don’t see it as opposed to labor standards or a high minimum wage or unions. I support sectoral bargaining. I support, in most places, a significantly higher minimum wage. But we can’t make public projects uniquely unaffordable and slow to build.
The thing that people to my left should really grapple with is this: If you want to build public housing or clean energy, then one definition of successful left governance would be to build enough of those two things. So what do you think needs to be changed to get there? Can you do it if it can cost you more than a million dollars to build a unit of affordable housing — as has happened in DC? Can you do it if it takes a decade or longer to lay down an interstate transmission line?
I think it’s fine to say that the backbone of your strategy is going to be public and not private, but then you have to grapple with how to deliver public projects affordably and fast. That’s where the rubber on this meets the road.
I think that we are seeing, between the Green New Deal left and things that are in Jacobin, the emergence of a left that wants to build a lot. I’m just not sure it’s really grappled with the fact that government, as it is currently set up, is not really able to do it — sometimes because of corporate power and moneyed interests but sometimes because there are so many rules and concessions that government itself simply can’t act agilely. That creates a broader problem: When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether. If you don’t increase the supply in the thing the state is subsidizing, you get lines. You get rationing. You get denials. You get delays. You get high costs. And people are going to be furious at you.
One of the most effective attacks on basically any form of ambitious expansion of social insurance or things the government does is the belief that if the government does it, it’s going to lead to shortages. You can see this with…
Auteur: Ezra Klein
