Abundance and the Irreplaceable Spark
Conclusion
In March 2025, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson published their #1 NYT Bestseller Abundance. This essay is the last of seven that evaluates the book’s premises and prescriptions for facts, fallacies and falsehood.
This installment will focus on the book’s Conclusion. The opening sentence of the concluding paragraph reads: “Abundance contains within it a bigness that befits the American project.” Yet, everything before and after is a repudiation of the concept of Americanism.
The Americans
To prove that it, is necessary to define “Americanism.” But with such an abstract term, there are many contexts that are useful: natural law, individualist ethics, political liberty, equal justice, economic freedom, and benevolence. To integrate individualism and economics, philosopher Harry Binswanger gives us the starting point:
The political economic expression of individualism is capitalism - the system of private property and free trade for private profit. If Americanism means anything, it means capitalism.
Fundamental to that is the integration of political liberty and justice. In other words, the morally defensible role of government from philosopher Ayn Rand:
And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack – against force. When, however, a government becomes an initiator of force – the injustice and moral corruption involved are truly unspeakable.
As displayed in the previous six articles in this series, not only do Klein and Thompson dismiss rights, liberty and justice, they seek to install a 21st century Marxist ideal: the “entrepreneurial state.”
Marx’s aim was not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance: to unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine.
However, this cannot be stated strongly enough: the individual with the entrepreneurial spark is rare, the mind cannot be forced to create, capitalism bans the initiation of force, government is force, legitimate government has the monopoly on retaliatory force.
The Communist Epiphany
Until the 1960s, it was standard procedure for Soviet propagandists and their American comrades to promise a future of abundance fueled by the hyper-productivity of collectivized effort. Their insidiously false premise was that a mystical equality of effort would lead to “a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world,” as Klein and Thompson put it.
But something changed in the 1970s. The imminent failure of the Soviet state was becoming obvious and the cabal that included the New York Times could no longer hide the slavery, starvation, and mass murder. Or as Abundance is wishing today, “more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction” was not evident in the Soviet suicide rates. So, what is a good communist to do?
Ostensibly, the goal is to demonize capitalism, but there’s something deeper. The greatest fear of the collectivist is independence. Productiveness and integrity require effort. Honest people who are self-reliant are a threat. But because the primary goal is to live off the ability of others, the cooperation of competent people is needed.
That’s where environmentalism came in handy. It was time to scrap abundance and declare sacrifice and renewables to be the ideal. After all, who doesn’t want to save the planet, right? But here it is 50 years later, and as described in Abundance, the communists have had another epiphany,
Environmentalists realized that sacrifice and scarcity was losing politics. They needed a strategy that married the life Americans want with the clean energy the planet could tolerate.
True to form, the forces of destruction will tell you what they’re after and how they will do it – with the expectation that you will go along – for the common good. Essentially, political power through a geometric increase in the confiscation of wealth for the collective goal of universal electric power.
The Current Wars
Why now? What was the catalyst for a 21st century Abundance Agenda that resurrects the Soviet propaganda model of abundance that needs to dismantle the environmental impact industry? After all, their parasitic business model is rich with countless lobbying groups - backed by extraordinary wealth - acquired from government contracts – and all funded by the value creation of American industry.
Essentially, why is environmental impact no longer important? And why has electric power generation become the holy grail of today’s communists? To answer the first question, the New York Times could no longer hide the environmental destruction of wind and solar installations. Or as energy expert Alex Epstein wrote in his book, Fossil Future,
But in reality, because solar and wind are dilute, they actually impact nature, as well has human developments, far more than fossil fuels do in many ways. As people on the anti-impact framework learn more about all the land use and mining and waste disposal involved in “green” solar and wind, they come to oppose solar and wind in many cases – especially when solar and wind are proposed near them.
Yet, Klein and Thompson write, “Investments in solar and wind installation, in electric vehicle plants and factories to manufacture next-generation batteries, have rocketed upward since.” But Epstein keep’s President Biden’s looting of America in perspective,
The idea of relying on a diverse, distant, and enormous network of solar panels and wind turbines amounts to “the sun in always shining somewhere” and “the wind is always blowing somewhere” . . . if we build enough long-distance transmission lines . . . a completely unprecedented global network . . . far beyond anything that has ever actually been achieved.
But now, environmental impact assessments are being dismissed. Apparently, it was never really about “saving the planet.”
The Irreplaceable Spark
To answer the second question, electric power has become the holy grail because the mining of crypto currency demands tremendous amounts of electricity and the meteoric rise of large language learning models, aka artificial intelligence, will demand many times more than that.
Therein lies the rub. The archenemies of communism - money and the mind, have now become its irreplaceable spark. That is poetic justice.
Great quantities of energy are needed to replicate the web of virtues necessary to create wealth and convert that into money. And far more energy is absorbed for the greater web of integrations needed to communicate abstract concepts.
But for the looters and moochers of the progressive State to promise free housing and transportation to everyone, or free medical and educational services to everyone, they will need unlimited electrical power to justify their unlimited political power.
As the previous six essays illustrated, it’s not going to work - because it can’t. The moral is the practical and their machinations deny reality. In contrast, abundance is aspirational and only individuals aspire – not society. And for your personally chosen values, Ayn Rand advises in her epic novel, Atlas Shrugged:
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.