Mark Dunkelman

We want bureaucracies to be able to move speedily

And we want them to be able to make decisions in the public interest.

And strangely enough, it is the reforms that we've seen since the 60s and 70s that have slowed government down so they cannot be responsive to the corporate challenge.

And so to my mind, like there's some confusion here and that the idea that we should abandon abundance in the name of just sort of attacking corporations misses the point that

Government should be a competent institution that can accurately and thoroughly review and challenge corporations when they're doing wrong.

I guess I'm sort of struck by the degree to which we're avoiding this sort of central question, which is who should be making big decisions, right?

Like in the 50s, 60s, like there were these public figures like Robert Moses or like Robert McNamara who were purportedly speaking for the public interest.

And progressivism turned against that model.

We become culturally averse to power almost no matter where it is.

And that means we don't like billionaires, but we don't like autocrats.

We don't like powerful bureaucrats.

Whoever is making the decision, our solution in every case is move the decision-making power somewhere else.

without really thinking like, well, what is the system we think would be fair to get to an expeditious decision that actually does serve the public interest?

And I think we can have conversations about the influence of money in politics, but like fundamentally what we need is government to be competent

in small doses so that we can grow from that.

The promise of abundance is that we will re-empower government to be able to make decisions expeditiously sort of across the board.

And we should hold the public figures who are making decisions accountable through elections.

But like, ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

And we need to have systems that allow some discretionary power to the people who are in powerful parts of government to be able to make decisions and then evaluate there.

I would hate for us to predicate our efforts to empower government to make decisions about housing, about housing.