Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about the economy to union members at the IBEW Local Union 26, February 15, 2023, in Lanham, Maryland.
Our former writing fellow and later Prospect senior staff writer Ezra Klein is one of the most influential alums of this magazine, now with a column at The New York Times. Klein is ingenious, inventive, good-hearted, and reads widely and deeply. Every once in a while, however, he gets infatuated with an intellectual framing that creates a straw man.
Lately, Klein has faulted liberals for focusing too much on the “demand side,” (by which he means purchasing power) and has called for a “supply side progressivism” or “a liberalism that builds.” This of course is exactly what President Biden has been trying to achieve with his program of extensive public investments and efforts to bring home supply chains; the immediate obstacles, as Klein acknowledges, are Republicans.
But Klein goes further and blames liberals for making building difficult by imposing regulatory hurdles, such as permitting requirements, environmental criteria, and zoning restrictions. On this point, he’s half right. But the problem is not just these impositions, but the corporate use of them to slow things down.
As our colleague David Dayen has argued, Klein tends to leave out of his analysis realities of political power. In this rebuttal to Klein, deftly titled “A Liberalism That Builds Power,” Dayen does a deep dive into recent projects attempted by government and adds the power analysis that Klein leaves out. And he notes the amazing successes of Biden’s several industrial policies that have leveraged extensive private investments, despite presumed regulatory barriers. They work even better when they empower workers. Conversely, Dayen points out, regulation hardly slows down corporations when they have the power to achieve what they want.
A favorite Klein example is the case of affordable housing. For Klein, the main problem is zoning and other regulatory barriers that make it more costly to build housing and raise costs. But as Dayen correctly points out, we have a very modest social-housing sector in the U.S. and limited funds for housing subsidies. We are largely at the mercy of developers. We could eliminate zoning restrictions and make it easier to build multifamily housing, and that would solve only a small portion of the affordable-housing shortage.
Klein gamely acknowledged Dayen’s critique and responds to it in this recent New York Times column, titled “Two Theories of What I’m Getting Wrong.” Klein writes, “In focusing on how power can be gained, [Dayen] is ignoring the very real way in which it can be lost. Power is lost when projects fail—and it is lost by the very interest groups Dayen wants to defend.”
Klein means unions. The trouble with that contention is that when unions are brought into the process, they can be big advocates of cutting red tape, as they were in Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s success in repairing the I-95 bridge collapse in record time.
By all means, we need to streamline approvals of public projects. But if you take a close look at how regulation works in practice, much of the glacial pace is the result of corporate capture of the regulatory process. It takes a power shift to reverse that. A good example, which I addressed in this piece, is the Biden administration’s reversal of the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from corporate ally, obstacle, and source of regulatory delay to enabler of public-interest regulation.
These two pieces, by Dayen and Klein (both Prospect products), are elegant examples of two of America’s smartest commentators debating what it will take for progressivism to succeed. You owe it to yourself to read both.
