Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson aren’t libertarians, don’t claim to be libertarians, and haven’t advanced libertarian economics in their book.

I agree with Noah’s post, except that I don’t think many Democrats’ failure to embrace the “abundance agenda” being advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is evidence of rejection of libertarian economics. Klein and Thompson’s book, Abundance, does not advance libertarian economics, so rejecting it cannot mean rejecting libertarian economics.

As I wrote in my review for Law & Liberty, Klein and Thompson do not grasp one of the fundamentals of libertarian economics: individualism. They frame the book around the main character of “we,” a word they use on nearly every page that refers at different times to the authors, the government, the American left, and Americans in general. It is incoherent, as “we” don’t agree on what the future should look like, yet Klein and Thompson have a specific vision based on green energy, mass transit, housing construction, and R&D development that they are seeking to bring about.

Libertarian economics doesn’t claim to know what the future will look like and doesn’t try to steer it. That’s because of work from F. A. Hayek and others about competition as a discovery process. It is only from participating in markets that consumers know what they want and producers learn how to provide it. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were impossible to predict beforehand, and no public or private planner could have brought them about without the market process generating the knowledge on which actions are based.

Klein and Thompson seem to get lumped in with libertarians because of their forceful, and welcome, rejection of the left-wing “degrowth” movement. But they ultimately still see economic growth and prosperity as a collective effort that government should guide, rather than a bottom-up confluence of individual decision-making that government planning cannot improve.

Simply affirming that economic growth is good is not sufficient to be considered libertarian. Mid-century Keynesianism thought economic growth was good, and you don’t have to talk to libertarians for very long to realize they can’t stand mid-century Keynesianism.

Klein and Thompson still fundamentally believe the Obama-era mottos that “government” is just another word for the things we do together, and that “you didn’t build that” because the government builds the roads. They aren’t libertarians, don’t claim to be libertarians, and haven’t advanced libertarian economics in their book.