Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Operation Warp Speed is the oddest political orphan. A program named after Star Trek has disappeared into its own kind of black hole. A policy that stimulated the economy more than the Apollo program, and which may have saved more lives than the Manhattan Project, has almost no loud champions in politics. Even its scarce champions seem intent on taking the wrong lessons from its success. In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, the University of Chicago professor Casey B. Mulligan, who had served as chief economist for the Trump White House, claimed that “the urgent lesson” from Operation Warp Speed was that “too much government hinders private innovation.”67 But OWS increased government spending by billions of dollars. With an urgency typically reserved for war, the federal government directed the development of vaccines from their testing to the final transport. It’s odd to claim that a program that expanded government powers succeeded by proving that one should never expand government powers.