Abundance, Yes, But

Extraction became more profitable than construction — and what that means for Abundance

The abundance crowd has identified a real problem, we can't build the things we need. Housing is expensive, healthcare is extraction, infrastructure crumbles, and climate solutions move too slowly.

But they've missed the critical elements of why. Businesses can make massive profits without taking risks or building enough of what we need. Scarcity serves them fine. The regulations they're blaming were often put in place by the very industries that are underproducing.

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein want you to believe the problem is unions demanding too much, environmentalists blocking progress, and government red tape strangling innovation. It's the same playbook Donald Trump uses when he blames immigrants for wage stagnation — technically true in some narrow sense, but missing the bigger picture entirely.

This isn't a funding problem. America already pays for abundance. We spend more on healthcare per capita than any country on Earth. We hand out billions in housing subsidies and tax breaks. We offer massive corporate incentives and infrastructure investments. The problem isn't that we're stingy with money — it's what that money buys. We get extraction instead of capacity, middlemen instead of builders, financial engineering instead of actual production. We already pay for abundance. What we don't have is the power to demand delivery.

Democrats and progressives often think we can just pay our way out of these problems. More housing subsidies, more healthcare funding, more childcare services — boom, problem solved. But that's clearly not happening. Because government has stopped acting as a builder. It no longer constructs hospitals, develops housing, or produces childcare. It doesn't compete in markets anymore. And without public production to check private extraction, prices just rise. Blank checks don't discipline markets — they inflate them. That's how you end up with a privatized NASA and a trillionaire rocket owner.

The real problem isn't that we regulate too much. It's that we've created protective rules for insiders, and those insiders have discovered that extraction pays better than construction. It's just easier to financialize everything than to actually build.

Take Delta. Last quarter, they reported $2.1 billion in profit — but without the billions they make selling credit card miles, they'd have operated at a loss. Same for United and American. Delta didn't earn that money flying planes. They earned it selling financial products. The airline is just a marketing arm for its credit card business.

This is the same pattern everywhere. Healthcare conglomerates don't make money by healing people more efficiently — they make money by owning the entire supply chain and extracting at every step. We spend 25-30% of every healthcare dollar on administration. That's extraction. When Germany does healthcare administration for 4.8% and Japan for 3%, anything above 5% is pure waste. With healthcare costs heading toward $7.7 trillion annually, that's $1.5-2 trillion per year extracted from sick people to pay people whose job is making healthcare harder to get.

This is what DOGE gets wrong when they look for waste, fraud, and abuse in government. The waste happens downstream, after government hands private industry the check. The fraud isn't some inefficient government worker — it's the entire business model of extraction that kicks in once we privatize delivery.

The American Medical Association helped create this by closing 75% of medical schools after the Flexner Report. Fewer doctors means higher doctor salaries. Insurance companies merge until most markets have two or three options. Hospital systems consolidate until they can name their price.

Look at Apple. They spent decades and billions building China's manufacturing ecosystem, training Chinese workers, developing supply chains that made China a manufacturing superpower. The numbers tell the story. In 2016, Cook secretly committed and SPENT $275 billion to China over five years — real money for real infrastructure, training programs, and manufacturing capacity. Two years later, he promised Trump $350 billion over five years for America. Apple followed through in China, building the world's most sophisticated electronics supply chain. In America? They never delivered. All we got was a broken promise and press releases about facilities that already existed.

While Apple was executing on its China commitment — building actual factories, training actual workers, creating actual capacity — its American "investment" consisted mostly of rebranding normal business expenses and taking credit for suppliers' pre-existing plans. The Information reported that Chinese officials demanded these investments because Apple "wasn't contributing enough to the local economy." American officials, apparently, are easier to satisfy with promises.

That Mac Pro facility Trump "opened" in 2019? It had been operating since 2013. Now Apple's back with another promise — $600 billion this time. But look closer: it's mostly repackaged spending from suppliers who were already building here, payments that would happen anyway, vague "procurement" that's just normal operations. It's tariff arbitrage disguised as patriotic capitalism.

Corporate America has figured out how to extract profits without the heavy lifting of actually building capacity or supply. Stock buybacks, financial engineering, rent-seeking through regulatory capture — it's all easier than building factories, training workers, or developing new infrastructure. Delta makes more money from credit cards than flights. Healthcare companies make more money from billing complexity than care delivery. Apple makes more money from financial engineering than manufacturing. This isn't just inefficient — it's an unproductive economy that can't deliver what we or the world needs, and it's not sustainable.

Trump isn't getting played here. Our leadership hasn't been getting played for the last 50 years. They know exactly what these promises are worth. It's us who've been getting played. While we fight about unions versus right-to-work, regulations versus free markets, immigrants versus natives, the real game continues: big business, big money, big lobbies chasing big profits without giving a good goddamn about building anything in this country. They keep us arguing about whether it's government's fault or workers' fault or environmentalists' fault, when they're the ones who chose extraction over construction, who chose China over Cleveland, who chose financial engineering over actual engineering.

Trump gets his headline. Apple gets their tariff exemption. China gets real factories. And we get another promise that'll be recycled in four years when the next administration needs a win. The system works perfectly — just not for us.

This is what Klein and Thompson miss when they blame unions and environmental reviews for our inability to build. Apple didn't fail to build in America because of red tape or high wages. They failed to build here because they didn't have to. They could extract what they wanted — tax breaks, tariff relief, good PR — without the heavy lifting of actual construction. The abundance agenda keeps looking for regulatory villains when the real problem is staring us in the face: extraction pays better than production, and we've built a system that rewards it.

When China demanded real investment, Apple delivered. When America asked for the same, Apple delivered paperwork. That's not because China has better regulations or fewer environmental reviews. It's because China made extraction impossible — you either build real capacity or you don't get market access. America made extraction easy — just promise big numbers, hire good lobbyists, and keep the tariffs away.

This isn't patriotic capitalism. Corporations don't have patriotism. They have profit optimization. And right now, the most profitable strategy is to extract from existing systems rather than build new ones. What makes Apple "American" anyway, when all their manufacturing infrastructure, their means of production, their worker training programs are in China? They're American when it's time to lobby Congress, Chinese when it's time to build factories.

Take housing. Klein and Thompson blame zoning laws and environmental reviews for keeping us from building enough. But they ignore who benefits from those laws and who has the power to change them. Homeowners want scarcity because it protects their asset values. Developers want predictable profits, not market competition. Realtors want transactions to stay expensive. Banks want property values to stay high. Local officials want to avoid angry voters.

None of these groups needs to meet in a room and conspire. They just need to protect what they've got. The result is a system that works exactly like protective tariffs — shielding existing producers from competition while making everything more expensive for consumers and new entries. This happens through campaign contributions to local officials, zoning boards stacked with real estate interests, trade associations like NAR spending millions on lobbying, and legal systems that give homeowners veto power over nearby development.

Klein and Thompson complain about the wrong regulations. The problem isn't environmental review or union wages. The problem is that we've created an entire economy of middlemen whose job is to extract rents from necessities. Meanwhile, our entire monetary system uses economic torture for the bottom 90% as its primary tool — the Fed fights inflation by making sure regular people can't afford things, which lets the wealthy buy up assets at a discount when people default.

It's like if we put a 30% tariff on housing and healthcare, then acted shocked that housing and healthcare were expensive. Except instead of a tariff, we have zoning laws that protect homeowner wealth, insurance networks that protect industry profits, licensing regimes that protect professional wages, and financial structures that protect investor returns. All while the people who need housing and healthcare pay more and get less.

The same pattern shows up everywhere: childcare bought up by private equity, food production controlled by a handful of corporations, broadband delivered by regional monopolies with captured regulators. These aren't accidents.

This is why public competition matters. Not because government is inherently better at building, but because government might be the only entity left with incentives to actually build rather than just extract.

If a public developer can build housing faster and cheaper, that proves the private market is underperforming because it doesn't want to perform. If a public insurer can deliver care with 5% administrative costs instead of 30%, that exposes how much the current system prefers extraction to efficiency. If public broadband works better than Comcast, if public transit moves people faster than highways, if public childcare costs less than private equity roll-ups — these aren't just services. They're proof that abundance is possible when you stop protecting scarcity.

Klein and Thompson are right that we need to build more. But we can't build more until we break the systems that profit from scarcity and recognize that private industry has lost interest in the hard work of actually building.

Here's what the abundance crowd won't tell you: fixing scarcity requires coordinated economic transformation on a massive scale. If we build enough homes for people to afford them, that means people's single greatest asset — their home — loses value. For most Americans, that's their entire wealth. So that has to be replaced with something else. Same with healthcare. If we built an efficient system that actually served everyone, millions of people doing unnecessary administrative work would need new jobs.

This isn't just about cutting red tape or building more. It's about managing the economic disruption that abundance would cause. The abundance agenda pretends you can flood markets with supply without dealing with the fact that scarcity is how millions of people pay their bills and build wealth.

That means public competition in housing, healthcare, childcare, broadband — all the sectors where private markets have failed to deliver abundance because they've discovered extraction is easier than construction.

The abundance agenda shouldn't be about cutting regulations that protect workers and the environment. It should be about ending the regulations that protect monopolies and rent-seekers.

Yes, we need abundance. But we won't get it until we stop subsidizing scarcity and start demanding that our money actually builds something. That means putting government back as general contractor and builder — not just piggy bank and regulator, but as a necessary force for competition, discipline, and delivery.