No, You Can’t Legislate Morality or Abundance
If you listen to the buzz in progressive state capitols and city halls across the country, or read Ezra Klein’s Abundance, you’d think our biggest problem is a crisis of state capacity. Klein, and a growing number of progressives, share a vision of a liberalism that builds. They argue that the government has become proficient at vetoing things but has lost its ability to get projects finished on time and under budget.
It’s understandable that Klein and the others want to discontinue policies that have unnecessarily increased government bureaucracy and slowed development. But from the perspective of sound governance, they have it backward. We don’t have a capacity problem; we have a scope problem.
By attempting to legislate the results of productivity, Klein inverts the causal order of prosperity. He treats the state as an engine to force social goals rather than the protector of the rights and conditions that allow abundance to emerge. The hard truth is that government cannot create abundance; it can only secure the political conditions for innovation and productivity—which chiefly requires that it refrain from obstructing them.
The Justice Trap
The foundation of Klein’s argument rests on a distinction he makes in the introduction: that markets are “fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.”
By reclassifying economic outputs—like housing or energy—as issues of justice rather than results of production, his framework treats them as matters of state administration instead of private action.
But justice is not a state-delivered outcome or a curated collection of subsidies; it is a condition. True justice demands the freedom to associate, produce, and trade. When a city decides that housing justice requires overriding market signals and private property, the government stops being a protector and starts being a central planner. We see this manifested repeatedly at the local level in the goals of affordable housing, permanent supportive housing, and economic development.
By declaring production to be a matter of state-defined justice, Klein strips the individual of any claim to their property or associations, if such claims conflict with the state’s goals.¹
The Myth of State Capacity
The book is steeped in a collectivist mindset, frequently using “we” to describe decisions that should belong to individuals. Klein’s framework operates on the explicit premise that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need [emphasis added].”² Thus, we must collectively decide what kind of neighborhoods to live in and then build them. But one person wants a quiet cul-de-sac; another wants a high-rise above a train station. When the state steps in to decide how we want to live and what we want to build, it isn’t we deciding—it is a small group of planners overriding the actual preferences of individuals. In almost every instance where Klein uses “we,” you can replace it with “the government.” “We need to build more” actually means “The state needs to mandate that more be built, regardless of property rights.”
Late in the book, Klein argues that the government simply needs to be “better.” But better by what standard, if the government’s original purpose (protecting individual rights and justice) is disregarded?
If we wish to preserve individual rights and individual justice, government is “better” when it engages in proper, rights-protecting activities and rejects the siren song of central planning. To the abundance advocate, however, “better” means a more efficient technocracy. They want a government that is faster at executing on its central planning—one that can override local hurdles not to protect or restore property rights, but to force the state’s preferred version of density. But doing the wrong things faster doesn’t make them right.
We see this most clearly in energy policy: the state seeks abundance for solar panels and transmission lines while restricting the very energy sources—fossil fuels—that power 80% of the world. This is not a quest for abundance; it is a political preference disguised as a supply-side solution. True abundance would require liberating all cost-effective energy, not simply being less bureaucratic about how restrictive policies are imposed and favors are provided. When the state determines the what and the who of production, it is a command economy, notwithstanding how its leaders claim to champion efficiency and production.
This mandate-driven approach doesn’t remain at the state level; it trickles down to city halls in the form of all-electric building mandates and restrictive, often nonsensical, climate action plans. When a California municipality mimics Sacramento by banning natural gas or prioritizing ideological energy targets over grid reliability, they aren’t creating abundance. They are imposing higher costs on local builders and leaving their own residents vulnerable to the instability of a state-managed grid. It is the local taxpayer and energy user who pay the price for this trickle-down technocracy.
The Productivity of the Untied Hand
Klein himself states the truth about halfway through the book, noting that affordable housing is built more cheaply and swiftly when public funds are avoided.³ He calls this fact “damning,” an example of the failure of state efficiency. In reality, such results demonstrate the inevitable success of the private sector, something that we should encourage and celebrate. The private sector does amazing things precisely when its hands are not tied by mandates, prevailing wage requirements, and the twenty-page social engineering checklists that govern 21st-century construction.
When local governments try to engineer abundance—whether through municipal fiber networks or subsidized housing—they take on economic risks they are ill-equipped to manage. They aim at a metric while violating the principles that produce actual prosperity. These projects carry a long fiscal shadow. When a private developer fails, the investors lose; when a city-led abundance project fails, the taxpayers lose their future. This failure is inevitable because when a municipality adopts abundance as a goal, it shifts from a principled organization to a metric-driven one. Fixated on a specific number—like “10,000 new units”—the city becomes willing to violate the very principles that produce actual prosperity.
This logic is the driving force behind Klein’s “Invent” chapter, where he advocates for the state to take the lead in funding and directing innovation. However, just because the government uses tax money to fund something that some people want or find useful doesn’t make the act right or the project sound. When the state funds research and development that would have occurred anyway, it simply adds layers of bureaucracy and political favoritism to a process that was working.
Perhaps more concerning is when the government funds projects that would not be funded voluntarily. In a free market, profit is a sign of sustainability; if greedy capital won’t touch it, it is a red flag that the project is not a value-creator. When the government overrides such judgment, it isn’t creating abundance; it is subsidizing inefficiency, or perhaps pet projects, at the expense of the taxpayer.
This same gatekeeping mentality—where the state picks winners in the research lab—extends to how cities manage land use. We see this in the surge of development agreements where cities essentially sell permission to build in exchange for political tribute. The city isn’t protecting your right to use your land; it is gatekeeping the market. If you want to build, you must first fund a park, provide below-market-rate units, or adhere to a specific aesthetic. This isn’t abundance; it’s a toll booth. By the time the goal is met, the underlying right to property has been replaced by a system of political patronage.
A city that functions as a gatekeeper eventually finds itself with less to gatekeep.
Conclusion: Freedom is the Source of Abundance
The Abundance Agenda amounts to a conceptual bait-and-switch. It takes abundance—the natural fruit of liberty—and tries to sell it back to us as a product of the state. But abundance is a byproduct, not a goal; it is what happens when people are left free to produce. Our history has shown that when the state stays in its lane, people satisfy their needs—and then some.
If we make abundance our political target, we invite technocratic schemes that inevitably stifle the very innovation we claim to want. We don’t need a government that aims at abundance; we need one that understands its proper scope: securing the conditions that produce it—namely, the freedom to associate and the right to use one’s property as one sees fit.
A true inquiry into abundance would ask: “What policies maximize human flourishing?” The answer is never more central planning; it is the restoration of the rights-protecting activities that allow people to build. No, you cannot legislate morality or abundance. But if you protect the freedom to produce, abundance will take care of itself.
¹ “State’s goals” is a fuzzy reference because it can mean whatever those in the position of influencing the state’s agenda decides them to be.
² Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 4.
³ Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 104.
Mark Moses is a senior fellow with the California Policy Center. He has thirty years of experience in local government administration and finance. His book, The Municipal Financial Crisis – A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting, was published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available from major online booksellers.
https://munifinanceguy.com/ X/Twitter: @MuniFinanceGuy