"A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a post-work, post-scarcity vision.
“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness.
In a world where two-thirds of emissions are now coming from middle-income countries like China and India, the only way for humanity to both address climate change and poverty is to invent our way to clean energy that is plentiful and cheap, and then spend enough to rapidly deploy it.
Progressives will note that pharmaceutical companies pump money into me-too drugs, spend gobsmacking amounts on advertising and administration, and make billions and billions in profits. And they’re right. It’s ludicrous to say that the pharmaceutical system we have now is oriented toward innovation. It’s oriented toward profit — sometimes that intersects with innovation and sometimes it doesn’t.
Too often, though, progressives let their argument drop there. They need to take the obvious next step: We should combine price controls with new policies to encourage drug development. That could include everything from more funding of basic research to huge prizes for discovering drugs that treat particular conditions to more public funding for drug trials. Years ago, Bernie Sanders had an interesting proposal for creating a system of pharmaceutical prizes in which companies could make millions or billions for inventing drugs that cured certain conditions, and those drugs would be immediately released without exclusive patent protections.
But this is a lesson progressives are, increasingly, learning. This is clearest on climate. Much of the spending in the Biden agenda is dedicated to increasing the supply of renewable energy and advanced batteries while building the supply of carbon-neutral transportation options. Democrats have realized that markets alone will not solve the climate crisis. And the same is true for much else on the progressive docket.
“The transportation, rail, public transit, and port investments will reduce efficiency-killing frictions that keep people and goods from getting to markets as quickly as they should,” they wrote. “The child and elder care investments will boost the labor supply of caretakers. The educational investments in pre-K and community college will eventually show up as higher productivity as a result of a better-educated work force.”
A list like this could go on. It’s not clear whether it’ll be in the reconciliation bill, for instance, but Biden has proposed an expansive plan to increase housing supply in part by pushing local governments to end exclusionary zoning laws. And in California, that’s exactly what’s happening. A decade ago, progressives talked often of making housing affordable, but they didn’t talk much about increasing housing supply. Now they do. That’s progress."
In the days of Smetona, the state organized the breeding of pigs and cows and the production and sale of bacon and butter. The British bought those of our bacon and that butter and ate it, preparing breakfast scrambled eggs with them. Today's independent Lithuanian governments have not yet found such an idea. The Lithuanian elite is just running around the world, depicting very principled and like Don Quixote fighting autocrats all over the world. This should not be the only job of our government.
