# Multimedia Multimedia --- - [Podcasts](/podcasts) - [Cato Video](/multimedia/cato-video) - [Video Series](/search/category/video-series) - [Events](/multimedia/events) [ Download Episode ](https://feeds.acast.com/public/streams/5e28e0d8963f166217546493/episodes/6a3c1fbc97b52d993655189b.mp3)Subscribe: [ Apple Podcasts ](http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/cato-daily-podcast/id158961219) [ Spotify ](https://open.spotify.com/show/4dHRhKEljj8zcLdl3Gvsv7) #### Transcript **Ryan Bourne:** Welcome to the Cato Podcast. I’m Ryan Bourne, Cato’s R. Evan Schaaf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics. Over recent years, a new intellectual movement on the centre-left has gathered momentum under the banner of abundance liberalism. Distinct from strands of the progressive left obsessed with redistribution or breaking up corporate power, abundance liberals seem to get the importance of economic growth and think that we need more infrastructure, more energy production, and more innovation. And in their desire to achieve those ends, they often seem willing to countenance clearing away regulatory bottlenecks and institutional veto points that, in some areas at least, would allow freer markets to deliver that abundance they seek. Now that aspect of their programme has led some libertarians to see abundance liberals as allies, particularly on issues such as housing, immigration, trade, and permitting reform. But is the abundance liberal movement a meaningful political force? Are the areas of overlap with libertarians enough to make us ideological cousins? And where are the major fault lines with libertarian thinking? To discuss this, I’m joined by Ilya Somin, George Mason law professor, Cato scholar, Volokh Conspiracy contributor, and proponent of such an alliance, and Jeremiah Johnson, the co-founder of the Centre for New Liberalism, who writes *The Infinite Scroll* on Substack. So let’s start with some table setting, Jeremiah, for those listeners uninitiated. What is abundance liberalism? Who are its proponents, and what do they really believe? **Jeremiah Johnson:** Abundance liberalism is an interesting movement because it is rooted in the very simplest form of politics, which is that having more better stuff is good. And you would think this would be a fairly uncontroversial claim, but modern politics being what it is, abundance liberalism roots itself in the idea that look, economic growth is good. The primary reason why current living standards are better than they were 25 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, is because we have grown, because the economy is bigger, because we’ve had scientific advances, because we have more better modes of transportation, modes of healthcare, modes of technology, and that we should want to continue this. Specifically, abundance liberalism identifies flaws within the dominant liberal paradigm that we exist in that are stopping that from happening. And I think we’re going to get into that, but it’s a lot of things that I think libertarians would find very sympathetic to their ears. **Ryan Bourne:** And just before we turn to Ilya, why do you think abundance liberalism has emerged specifically now? So I can imagine a couple of different theses here. One might be it’s a response to economic reality. We’ve just lived through the highest inflation since 1981. We did what many on the progressive left wanted of kind of running the economy hot with vast amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus, and that produced a whole bunch of inflation. I think that made many people aware that there are a lot of challenges in the US economy on the supply side, and that there was less of a macroeconomic story that you could tell that problems were insufficient demand. I could also say that maybe it’s just a recognition that many progressive goals—long-held progressive goals on housing, on climate, healthcare—simply can’t happen unless you kind of fix the rules that currently stop things getting built or stop things getting done. So what’s your best explanation for why this has arisen now? **Jeremiah Johnson:** Yeah, I think that the timing with inflation is interesting, but ultimately not really a cause. I think this was coming, whether or not we had experienced that inflation or not. I trace this all the way back to kind of the Ralph Nader movement that originated in the ’60s and ’70s, where you really saw the growth of the bureaucratic state in a way that didn’t exist in prior decades, in a way that didn’t exist in the 1930s or ’40s or ’50s. For several decades, you saw this growth of legalism, of bureaucracy, of red tape, of a progressive movement that was not concerned with building things, but that was concerned with process—that was concerned with making sure that we had the right boxes checked, that we had the right forms filled out, and that that was really the highest good, to make sure that this kind of very lawyer-oriented, legal, bureaucratic view of the state was what triumphed. And this has been the way that the state has operated for decades now. To some extent, people don’t even realize that there’s another way because it is now the water in which we swim. In a David Foster Wallace “this is water” kind of way of speaking, this is how everything is now. And I think that abundance liberalism is a reaction against that kind of endless paperwork, endless bureaucracy that means that for San Francisco to build a toilet costs a million dollars. **Ryan Bourne:** So Ilya, that all sounds pretty interesting, pretty promising from a libertarian perspective. We’ve obviously had long-held critiques of the administrative state and the bureaucratic state, but you’ve made the case for, I think, a broader type of alliance between libertarians and abundance liberals. So what is your case for that? At its core, what is your case for that? **Ilya Somin:** Sure. I think it revolves around several big specific issues and also some important common principles that are more general and important for political alliances having common enemies. So let’s start with the big issues. I think there are four big issues where there’s a lot of agreement, though perhaps not total agreement, between libertarians and abundance liberals. One is housing, the most obvious one. Both sides favor what are known as “yes in my backyard,” Yimby housing deregulation. Another is trade. Both groups generally favor free international trade as opposed to protectionism. A third is immigration. While most abundance liberals are not as radical on this as I am, they do generally favor liberalization and view immigration as a positive, generally good thing. And then, finally, nuclear power, which is a very valuable energy source, both in terms of producing more energy, but also in being cleaner than, say, coal or oil or the like. So all of these are big important issues that have huge effects on millions of people, and there’s a lot of agreement on them. Then there’s a couple more general principles that I think there’s agreement on. One is understanding that the economy is not a zero-sum game and accepting basic economics 101 principles, even though obviously there will be marginal disagreements in some of these ideas. And then there is distaste and opposition to the identity politics of both the right and the left, both sort of the nationalist identity politics of much of the right and the sort of left-wing identity politics of racial preferences and the like. Both groups then tend to be critical of these two types of identity politics. And then, finally, the common enemies. We think we have obvious common adversaries in the sort of nationalist big-government right, which views the world in zero-sum terms and wants to suppress immigration and trade and centrally plan large parts of the economy, and then also the socialist left, people like the Democratic Socialists of America, Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and so on. So common enemies are often a significant factor bringing together political allies, and we certainly have them here. **Ryan Bourne:** So just before I—I mean, there’s a lot in that answer, but before we get into some of the kind of meat of the conversation, I guess, when you say an alliance, what do you really envisage by that? Is it an intellectual alliance? Is it a political alliance? You know, are you envisaging libertarian voters—advocating for libertarian voters to vote for abundance liberal candidates? What exactly do you have in mind, though? **Ilya Somin:** Yeah, so it’s a great question. I’d be lying if I said I have a complete and total game plan for exactly how it should work, but I think it can work on multiple levels. First, an immediate step, the one that’s the easiest to take is, as you suggest, a kind of intellectual alliance where thought leaders and intellectuals in the two groups meet as we are trying to do here, discuss common issues, think about common agendas and strategies, and the like. Second, I would hope to move towards a more political type of alliance as well. You know, having candidates, political strategies, other things of that sort. You know, ideally, you might even have libertarian-leaning people becoming factors in Democratic primaries in particular situations, where we have more abundance types running against more socialist types. And also, this could have an effect on general elections as well. The political strategy part of it is something that may be better worked out by people with greater expertise in political strategy than I have. Having written a book about political ignorance, I have to be conscious of the limits of my own knowledge. That said, I at least want to get the political strategy types and activists and the like interested in developing the necessary political strategies so that they can start to do that work. So ultimately, if things go the way I hope they might, I envision sort of a coalition on multiple different levels. There could be a role for sort of policy elites and writers and intellectuals and the like, but there would also be a sort of a more underground role in practical politics as well. **Ryan Bourne:** Jeremiah, when you hear that case being made, what is your kind of instinctive reaction? **Jeremiah Johnson:** Well, and not to insult the libertarian-leaning audience, but I think this is likely more a movement that relies on elite persuasion more than it does on ground political canvassing or anything like that. I think that’s good for our prospects because it’s hard to build a mass movement around removing zoning regulations. We’ve seen it with the Yimby movement a little bit, but this is a case where Yimby successes—and they’ve existed in many places around the country—are the result of elite persuasion. We have convinced people who are already in power, people who were already in elected offices, in influential executive branch positions, thought leaders in media and think tanks, and so forth. We’ve basically just convinced them of the correctness of the Yimby movement and that our ideas are correct and they should implement them. It is not the case that people are walking through the streets of New York or Dallas or wherever else chanting about Yimbyism. I think this is good for us because, in a practical sense, libertarian politics does not exist to a first degree. There’s no meaningful infrastructure the way that there is on the progressive left or the MAGA right. There’s certainly a network of think tanks and there’s certainly a network of people who are well equipped to do the elite persuasion task. I would say there is not any meaningful network of libertarians who are prepared to build a mass movement, but that’s okay. We don’t need the mass movement; what we need is elite persuasion, and I think that we’ve done a good job in select areas at that, and that’s where we have to keep pushing forward. **Ryan Bourne:** I was intrigued by the way that Ilya set out the common enemies of the nationalist right and the harder progressive left, because from what I’ve seen from a distance—I don’t follow this all too closely—but a lot of abundance intellectuals have got pretty excited about certain things that Zohran Mamdani has proposed on housing. He then undercuts a lot of that with policies of rent freezes and inclusive zoning and commitments to public housing and all those other things that can actually gum up the private sector from delivering an abundance of private apartments or whatever. But a lot of progressive politicians have started putting the abundance banner on various pieces of proposed legislation or at least trying to combine the populist elements of their program with an abundance component of their program. Do you agree with Ilya that libertarians and abundance liberals share a common enemy in the harder progressive left, or is the elite abundance movement trying to influence the progressive left? **Jeremiah Johnson:** I agree that there is a common enemy, and Mamdani is an interesting case because his greatest political superpower right now is doing kind of whatever he feels like doing and convincing everyone that he’s on their side. And so you see abundance liberals taking certain signals that he’s read about Yimby, he knows what’s up, whereas the socialists are reading different signals that no, he wants to do what we want, and even very mundane things that he does, that every mayor does, like filling in potholes, he gets people really excited about it, and that’s a function of his charisma. But in the broader context, Mamdani is not the worst case, is one of the things I would emphasize here. Mamdani is, I think, at least partially open to smart, wonkish ideas, and he’s coming from a different value system than I do and probably than anybody in this conversation does, but I think there’s at least a little bit of baseline seriousness. There are much worse candidates coming down the road, there are much worse mayors in major American cities, there are much worse congressional candidates on the left, and there are people who are going to be openly advocating for degrowth, openly advocating for very authoritarian-style socialism. There are people on the left who are sympathetic to the Communist Party of China. This is a really worrying trend, that not just a touchy-feely democratic socialism, but like outright boot-in-your-face socialism has an actual audience now in America. So there is a serious threat to liberalism, small‑L liberalism, coming from the left. There’s an equally serious threat coming from the right, of course, and in many ways more dangerous because they do actually now hold the levers of government in their grasp. So we should remind ourselves of that as well. But yeah, I think that focusing on Mamdani is not the worst-case scenario; he is by far not as bad as it gets, and that’s what I would caution people. **Ryan Bourne:** So Ilya, in any exchange, both parties have to consider that they’re better off from engaging in it voluntarily. So what do libertarians have to offer abundance liberals if you were making the case for this alliance? **Ilya Somin:** Sure. So I said this in my initial blog post about this a few weeks ago, and I’m happy to summarize two things. One is Jeremiah mentioned the idea of sort of a more elite-focused alliance. Obviously, libertarians for decades now have batted above their weight class—if I want to put it this way—in elite intellectual and policy debates of various types, including on many of the issues we just mentioned: economic growth, housing, immigration, trade, and so forth. So on the elite intellectual level, it’s a relative no-brainer, especially since abundance liberals, while definitely having some excellent intellectual talent, including, yes, Jeremiah and others, they have less policy infrastructure than sort of more traditional left-wingers do, and therefore the libertarian infrastructure can help. Jeremiah suggested that this should be primarily, if not exclusively, an elite-focused movement. I think there can be and should be a mass aspect as well. I’d be lying if I said, well, there’s a vast mass base of libertarian voters out there; if there was, the political world would look very different. But the data suggests there may well be 5, 10, 15% of the electorate which have at least roughly somewhat libertarian views. And that part of the electorate could be significant in close election campaigns, in primary situations, in other areas. And it could potentially, among other things, help more abundance-focused people in the internal struggle in various Democratic primaries and the like. They could be significant in general elections. There’s various data which suggests this group are often swing voters in general as well. So I don’t want to overestimate that, but there is an offer of a significant intellectual infrastructure, if you want to put it this way, plus a mass group, which is very much a minority but could potentially be useful at the margin. And a lot of campaigns in recent years often are relatively close. **Ryan Bourne:** So one reason for maybe skepticism of a mass movement here might be that abundance liberalism now has been around for a couple of years. It’s got a lot of playtime on op-eds and TV debates, but it is primarily an elite frame. And a recent New York Times/​Siena poll found that among Democratic voters, 94% said they hadn’t heard of or didn’t know enough about abundance to have an opinion, while of course socialism was far better known and much more favorably viewed. Now that might not matter if the movement is more about influencing Democratic politicians, staffers, and wonks. Does it really matter if people don’t identify under a particular banner? But there’s a worry here, isn’t there, Jeremiah, that the Democratic Party, at least, is fundamentally just not very abundance-pilled right now? **Jeremiah Johnson:** There is a worry, yeah. And I think that the label actually does matter. Messaging in politics matters quite a lot, and having an idea that really resonates with people is very powerful. That idea usually needs to be pretty simple. Voters are many things; receptacles for extremely complex phrasing is not one of them. So if you can express a powerful idea very simply, that matters. And so this is part of the reason that you see socialism rising in popularity, because it’s just a very simple label that can apply to a lot of things. So I would like to see abundance as a movement at least try a little bit harder to get some favorability. But in terms of influencing the Democratic Party, this is where I would talk to libertarians and say, if you want to maximize your actual political engagement rather than your policy work, you should register as a Democrat. There is still a faction of Democrats fighting to make the Democratic Party more oriented around markets, more friendly to abundance, more friendly to moderation. And that faction is engaged in primaries all the time with people on the far left, with people who are anti-abundance, who essentially want to run on a platform of socialism or degrowth or some combination of the two. And we need your help winning those battles. I would equally say that neutral political analysis is that that faction simply does not exist on the right anymore. You cannot have any influence as a pro-market, pro-immigration, pro-housing—that kind of perspective on the right, at least for now, has totally vanished. You will have absolutely no influence. And so if you’re hoping to make a difference in the two-party system as it exists right now, I think that you will have more influence on the Democratic side trying to get pro-abundance Democrats elected than anything else. And certainly, we could use your help. **Ryan Bourne:** Political parties are obviously influenced by where they think their voter bases are, but also by interest groups. And my concern here, Jeremiah, just to push back a little bit, is that within the Democratic coalition—perhaps not enemies, but a lot of the things you want fundamental reform on as abundance liberals: public sector regulators, neutering environmentalists, dealing with other stakeholder activists—they’re a big part of the Democratic coalition, the Democratic machine. Isn’t it the case that abundance and the way of achieving it will necessarily be watered down to hold that type of coalition together? Because if the pitch is, “Look, we’re going to fight labor unions, we’re going to fight racial participation mandates, environmental regulations, lawsuits, government bureaucracy—all these things make projects more expensive,” wouldn’t that type of agenda destroy the Democratic Party? **Jeremiah Johnson:** I don’t think it’s destroying the Democratic Party right now, and we’re already making progress doing it. You can see the fruits of the labor; I don’t have to make a theoretical case for you here. New York just passed a reform to its state environmental bill. NEPA is the National Environmental Protection Act, and there’s state versions of that—there’s a California version, CEQA, and there’s a New York version. Pretty much every blue state has some of this. And you’re seeing major movement in getting those watered down or significantly reformed. And it’s not because Republicans have all of a sudden taken power in the New York State House in Albany; it’s all coming from Democrats. It’s coming from Democratic governors, Democratic state legislatures. Many of the best Yimby movements are coming from, again, Minnesota, California, New York. We’re seeing progress. And certainly, the progress needs to be faster, and it needs to reach a greater depth, but you’re already seeing this happen. So my argument here would just be: look at the results. We’re already winning in blue states in many ways, and we just need to push further. **Ryan Bourne:** So Ilya, housing, of course, is a relatively easy case. And certain other permitting reform and building is perhaps an easier case than some of the other things, too. Yimbys and libertarians both dislike zoning, land use laws, stringent building codes—things that empower incumbent homeowners often and restrict the supply of housing. But is that an unusually easy case because it’s one of the few areas where the progressive ends of wanting cheaper housing for poorer people and libertarian means line up almost perfectly? It seems to me that that is an obvious area where we could work together. But on some of the other issues, it’s a lot more difficult. **Ilya Somin:** So I would say that the other three issues that I mentioned at the start have the same similarity. Immigration helps poor people, lowers prices, and increases economic growth, and many people on the left are sympathetic to immigrants for social justice as well. The issue of nuclear power—it’s a cleaner form of energy, it lowers prices, and so forth, and therefore it has many of those same features. The issue of trade in recent years feels a little bit less natural, but there are some forces which make it more so. One is the very fact that the right has become so protectionist makes it more difficult for the left to be otherwise, and this ties several of these issues together. There is actually a lot of progress that can be made simply by emphasizing that protectionism increases people’s prices—that has already made Trump’s tariffs very unpopular. And there’s actually a long history of successful mass movements for free trade based around this very issue. Richard Cobden first pioneered this with the Anti-Corn Law League way back in the 1840s, the original free trade movement. And he essentially emphasized to the ordinary English voter—who was just as ignorant as our voters are today, if not more so—that these people are raising your prices, and that’s why you should support getting rid of the Corn Laws and other forms of protectionism. And in terms of building a mass movement, it is not my claim that every idea that I think is good can also be made wildly popular. On the contrary, I’m the author of a book about political ignorance, and other work would suggest that what is popular is often very bad. However, several of the ideas that we’ve been talking about today can at least be made more popular by emphasizing intuitive ways about how they can lower people’s prices. That’s most obviously true with free trade, but some of the other issues work that way as well. You can emphasize this more on housing. Polling data shows that if you frame it in terms of property owners being able to build what they want on their land, it becomes more popular than if you emphasize developers doing things. Now, I think as a practical matter, often the property owners who should be allowed to build what they want are in fact developers, but you can see how that framing works. Similar arguments can be made about immigration and nuclear power. I would emphasize this also as a long-term kind of point: that with immigration and trade and other issues involving people with different ethnicities, foreigners, and so forth, we can learn from previous successes of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and others which found ways to emphasize fundamental similarities between people and depicting differences as morally arbitrary. While this will not win an election in the very immediate future, it is an important medium- to long-term strategy that I think these two groups should consider because it has worked before very well with respect to promoting liberty and equality for other groups. I think it can work for things like immigration as well. **Jeremiah Johnson:** I agree with Ilya here, but I kind of want to take the question where you were guiding us, because you’re kind of poking us with a stick a little bit trying to say like, “Aren’t there some differences here?” And while Ilya is right that there are many areas of overlap that are genuine and deep areas of overlap, there are going to be some areas where I think libertarians might be slightly uncomfortable with some of the things that liberals are planning. So I don’t want to entirely paper over that; it’s best to confront it head-on if it exists. One of the kind of signatures of abundance liberalism is that it wants things to happen faster. If we’re going to be building housing, it shouldn’t take three years of permitting process. The permitting process, such that it exists, should be fast and very easy. And in addition to that, abundance liberals would say that’s the case whether the market is building housing or whether the state is building housing. And I’m going to do something that is going to probably infuriate a bunch of libertarian listeners here: I’m going to say something nice about FDR. There’s a story I like to tell when I’m communicating these ideas to my more progressive friends, my friends who are more firmly on the left. I like to talk about how FDR, when he was instituting the New Deal, could just really do things at a pace that was absolutely unbelievable. He would propose some new big government program, right? And he would propose it to Congress in, say, mid-March. And by like April 6th, they would be voting on it in Congress, and it would have passed by April 8th. And by April 11th, there would be shovels in the ground digging the stuff up, beginning construction on some new Tennessee Valley Authority thing. And they would have built it in 10 months. And there are some instances where, in the New Deal, an entire program was passed by Congress, funding allocated, all the stuff got built, and the program was shut down for having finished everything it said it was going to do, like 11 months later. And regardless of whether or not you think that the government has a role to be doing gigantic building programs of that nature, surely it is better for the government to be spending a lot of money to do something big and fast than for the government to spend a lot of money to do not much of anything at all—to spend a lot of money to fill out forms. Because I think one of the political miscalculations of the Joe Biden era was that he passed a bunch of trillion-dollar bills, envisioning himself as a sort of modern FDR, but he didn’t solve the problem of actually getting that money out the door to do anything fast. We passed a bunch of bills and got to see almost nothing from it. When FDR had the New Deal, at least you could see a bunch of public works, at least you could see dams that were built—there’s physical evidence that something was done. Maybe libertarians will be uncomfortable with that part. I would encourage them not to be, if nothing else for the sake of political expediency, and also just from the idea that, from a libertarian perspective, take the second-best option. You’re never going to get rid of government spending, not in the next generation, so you should at least want that government spending to be efficient. If the New York City government is going to be building subway extensions, you should want that to be done at $200 million a mile rather than $2 billion a mile, which is about what it currently costs. Abundance liberals are focused on clearing red tape for the private sector, but also clearing red tape that encumbers the public sector. There may be some conflict there, but hopefully, this is something that libertarians can see as a partial win as well. **Ryan Bourne:** You teed me up to go get my biggest stick to poke Ilya on this next question. Because I do think that this brings me to a meta-concern for libertarians, which often gets understated, I think, in this debate. I think there’s a fundamental difference in approach between libertarians and abundance liberals, as you’ve just articulated, that means any alliance will necessarily only ever be issue by issue. That is, from what I’ve seen and what I’ve read, abundance liberals—or when they were calling themselves supply-side progressives, Ezra Klein beforehand—they tend to think of policy change in terms of removing barriers or improving prospects in the service of achieving some government-deigned objective, some government-deigned mission. Now, when that mission is more building, fine, we have a lot of common ground. If that mission is we want to get shed loads of renewable energy and improve permitting holdups that would then activate tons of government subsidies to otherwise uneconomic projects, I think libertarians like me become much more uncomfortable. That, I think, highlights a fundamental distinction that, Ilya, I would love your thoughts on, which is: libertarians come at regulation with a prior towards liberty in general. I think abundance liberals want that liberty in the service of achieving a societal goal. Yes, we hate the government owning the means of production, we oppose socialism, but you know what? I don’t really like governments determining a lot of the ends of production either. To the extent that a lot of this agenda is about improving the efficiency of the state to deliver on its objectives, yes, I accept that in many cases that’s a marginal improvement, but wouldn’t a political alliance of some form be an implicit endorsement of tons of programs that we then oppose? **Ilya Somin:** I would say a couple of things here. Obviously, abundance liberals and virtually any kind of liberals in the modern sense of the word favor a larger role for government than libertarians do. Realistically, any political allies that libertarians can realistically seek out are going to be people who favor a larger role for government, at least in some areas, than we do. Whether we’re talking about conservatives or moderates or abundance liberals or anybody else, unless your only political allies are other libertarians—in which case there’s no point in talking about alliances at all—the available allies are going to be people who favor a bigger role for government than we do. The question is, first, which group among the possible allies out there is the one that still favors less government overall than the other potential alternatives? And in the current political environment, that’s very obviously abundance liberals. Second, while it is true that I think abundance liberals, in my view at least, are over-optimistic about government building big infrastructure projects and the like, and they’re a little bit over-fond of some of the projects in the New Deal—not necessarily Jeremiah specifically, but they may forget that the New Deal also had things like the National Recovery Act, which horribly extended a depression and had large-scale systems of price controls and things of that sort—nonetheless, a movement that wants to focus government energy on efficiency, if you want to call it that, on building infrastructure projects is way less bad than one that wants to own the means of production or have massive nativism and protectionism and the like, or control people’s speech and so on. The fact that this is a movement that at least appreciates Econ 101, as I said before, that puts some constraints on those harmful ambitions, even though obviously more libertarian economists and other libertarians like me would go further than Econ 101 does in stigmatizing various kinds of government projects. I mentioned earlier that there’s also important points of philosophical agreement, to which one might add the idea that we accept that people have diverse preferences and that therefore what we want to do is have a political and economic system which allows a wide variety of people to pursue diverse preferences, as opposed to having one dictated set of preferences, whether it be a right-wing version thereof or a left-wing one. But there will be disagreements. There will be problems. When you vote for a candidate, it will still often be voting for a lesser evil rather than voting for one that I as a libertarian fully agree with, at least if you want to vote for a candidate that has a meaningful chance of actually winning office. And obviously, like all political alliances, there’s no guarantee that this one would be forever. If things work out well and it achieves its main goals, which I hope would be great if it did, you can imagine an era 20 years from now or something where there’s just a different set of issues on the table and the issues that divide the two groups will be more significant than those that unite them—just as I think the fusionist alliance between libertarians and conservatives fell apart for a number of reasons. But one reason is that the issues that are particularly prominent now are ones that tend to divide libertarians and conservatives, in addition to conservatives becoming more nationalistic and, as Jeremiah said, becoming more big government in general. Also, in an era when something like immigration and trade are high on the agenda and we don’t have the threat of communism in the same way, it doesn’t unite libertarians and conservatives as much as the environment of, say, the 1970s might have done. So yeah, absolutely there are disagreements, and I don’t hide them, but I think that in the current political environment, which may well persist for some time, the areas of agreement are more significant. And as always, you have to compare things to the realistic alternatives, and this alliance is a better prospect than what else seems to be available. **Ryan Bourne:** Here’s how I would address this. I would offer a riddle, and we’re at that part of the podcast now: So how do you eat an elephant? So that may be beyond my capabilities, but maybe the better way to eat an elephant is to eat something else which is more digestible, but undoubtedly you have a better solution. **Jeremiah Johnson:** There’s an old saying that says, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” And this is—if you are a libertarian, this has got to be your method of seeking liberty. I disagree with you about certain aspects of the state; I think it’s good for the state to spend much of the money that it does. Maybe libertarians would disagree, but the reality is that you are not going to get the state to become a libertarian paradise in the next five years. You are going to have to choose which part of the elephant you want to eat first. You’re going to have to make progress a little bit at a time, and that’s going to be how you operate. My case to you as a non-libertarian speaking to a libertarian is to take seriously the most important threats to liberty right now. I do not think that the most important threat to liberty is the idea that the government is taking 15% of your paycheck via income taxes or something like that. To me, even if you view that as a threat to liberty, that is such a minor part of it compared to what the government is doing with immigration—to the Gestapo-style tactics of rounding people up and putting them in camps, masked agents bursting down doors without warrants, shooting American citizens in the street, the global choking of free trade, the insane restrictions that we have on building just about anything in this country, whether it’s building your own business, building infrastructure, building housing, building green energy. If you think about what threatens your personal liberty, and you’re out there listening, what is genuinely making you less free? Is it the fact that the government again might take 15 to 20% of your income? Maybe. But is it the fact that you physically cannot open a new business if you live in San Francisco? You will be arrested; it’s illegal without going through three years of paperwork. That if you want to put a solar panel on the top of your own house that you own, that the regulations around that are a mile long, and again, it may just be totally illegal for you to do that on your own property? That if you own a piece of property, you cannot develop it in the way you want? To me, my essential argument that libertarians should be part of this movement is that those restrictions on your freedom are far more serious and far more impactful to your day-to-day life than the idea that just the government spends money—that it taxes and spends. I understand maybe we’re not going to ever reach fundamental agreement on how much the government should tax and spend, but I think those other areas are just far, far more serious infringements on liberty. If you’re eating the elephant as a libertarian, those are the bites you should be taking first, and if they are, then I want to be your ally. Please help me. Please join the movement. Please help us out. We could use it. **Ryan Bourne:** Matt Yglesias, obviously a major writer, thinker, and abundance liberal, wrote a response to you in which I read him as basically saying, “Look, I favor this alliance too, but I think libertarians have ultimately got to come to more peace with a redistributive welfare state, perhaps less emphasis on property rights, and a bunch of other state capacity functions that we typically oppose in principle.” Now, I saw that restatement of his as really kind of longing for a kind of “liberalitarianism” that my former colleague Brink Lindsey kind of pushed for at the back end of the last decade. So what’s your response to Matt, and why do you think that this would be successful in a way that that project never really kind of—it failed to get off the ground? **Ilya Somin:** Yeah, so I would say a couple of things. One is I, in fact, wrote a rejoinder to Matt Yglesias, where I both noted the importance of his support for the possible alliance—he’s obviously a much more politically influential figure, certainly, than I am—but also I responded to his specific points. And, you know, I won’t get into all the details of that, but you can read my post on this on the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the *Reason* website for free. As to why liberalitarianism in the late 2000s, about 15 years ago, largely failed whereas this could succeed, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is the rise of an abundance liberal movement of a kind that didn’t, for the most part, exist 15 years ago. Matt Yglesias had begun to write his stuff on Yimby housing at that time, but there wasn’t really as much of a movement like this. The other is that, back 15 years ago, I myself had skepticism about liberalitarianism, in part because there was still a useful political alliance between conservatives and libertarians at that time, at least. Today, for the most part, that just isn’t true because, as Jeremiah quite correctly explained earlier in our discussion, we have a political right that has become big-government nationalists, with nativism, protectionism, the government taking stakes in corporations, and so forth—which the Trump administration has done more than any other administration since the FDR era that we talked about earlier. He actually is doing government ownership of the means of production in some ways more than Mamdani is, though I’m not sure he really favors it more than Mamdani, but Mamdani as mayor of New York is more constrained than the president of the United States. The bottom line is the prospects are better today than they were 15 years ago, both because there is more of an appropriate movement among liberals to do this and because our other options are much worse than they were back in the day when, say, Paul Ryan was an important figure in the Republican Party and he had important common ground with libertarians in a way that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller very obviously do not. **Ryan Bourne:** I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for. I really appreciate the conversation; I thought it was very fruitful. Ilya, as always, you put out an interesting, provocative piece for libertarians, and that’s kicked off a whole debate, and Matt Yglesias obviously responded to you. I know David Friedman, the son of Milton Friedman and a great libertarian himself, has responded with a bunch of essays too, which I’d urge listeners to read. But again, thank you so much, Jeremiah, for being here. Thank you to Ilya. That’s all we’ve got time for. You can find the next Cato Podcast early next week on Tuesday on the Cato Podcast feed. So thanks again. **Jeremiah Johnson:** Thank you for having me. **Ilya Somin:** Thank you so much. Cato Podcast • June 25, 2026 # The Abundance Alliance? Abundance liberals want a politics focused on delivering more homes, energy projects, infrastructure, and innovation, and will even countenance deregulation to achieve it. Cato’s Ryan Bourne talks to Ilya Somin and Jeremiah Johnson about whether libertarians should ally with this movement—or whether shared ground on housing, permitting, trade, and immigration masks irreconcilable disagreements over the role and size of government. **Show notes:** - Ilya Somin, “[Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism](https://reason.com/volokh/2026/04/23/two-cheers-for-abundance-liberalism/),” The Volokh Conspiracy, April 23, 2026. - Matt Yglesias, “[What Libertarians Get Wrong About Freedom](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-libertarians-get-wrong-about),” The Argument, May 20, 2026. - Ilya Somin, “[Matt Yglesias on Libertarianism, Abundance Liberalism, and a Possible Alliance Between the Two](https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/20/matt-yglesias-on-libertarianism-abundance-liberalism-and-a-possible-alliance-between-the-two/),” The Volokh Conspiracy, May 20, 2026. - David Friedman, “[Libertarians and Abundance Liberals](https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/libertarians-and-abundance-liberals),” David Friedman’s Substack, May 28, 2026. - Ryan Bourne, “[One and a Half Cheers for Supply-Side Progressivism](https://ryanbourne.substack.com/p/one-and-a-half-cheers-for-supply),” The War on Prices, September 16, 2022. [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). ##### Featuring [![Ryan Bourne](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2021-01/Ryan%20Bourne.jpg?itok=nv8-2r7d)](/people/ryan-bourne) ##### [Ryan Bourne](/people/ryan-bourne) R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics, Cato Institute [ ](https://x.com/MrRBourne) [ ](mailto:rbourne@cato.org) ##### Jeremiah Johnson [![ilya-somin-cropped.jpg](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2023-04/ilya-somin-cropped.jpg?itok=J1IxBVI7)](/people/ilya-somin) ##### [Ilya Somin](/people/ilya-somin) Professor of Law, George Mason University, and B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute [ ](https://x.com/ilyasomin)