My primary critique of Abundance echoes this one from Sandeep Vaheesan: essentially, Democratic industrial policy is stuck in a rut. Democrats do not believe in the public production of goods. Instead, we give private producers of goods public dollars and pray they won't raise prices, because Democrats are also against price controls. From postsecondary education to healthcare and housing, it is painfully obvious to any American suffering for want of housing, healthcare, and education — and unwilling, or unable to pay additional rents in the form of interest on top of inflated prices — that this does not work. Or, to be more accurate: it delivers temporary benefits before making everything more expensive. Private interests in capitalism are profit seeking: if you give them money, they are required by the logic of the system to try to get more of it. The cronyism decried by libertarians and neoliberals is not an aberration, it is a competitive adaptive behavior inherent to the exigencies of the economic system itself.
