Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The smartest question, then, is not if the government should intervene in markets, but how to do so. Nearly one hundred years ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes offered an elegant answer in his 1926 book The End of Laissez-Faire. “The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all,” he wrote. If technological progress requires money or resources that are beyond the scope of any one company, and government does nothing, progress slows down. This is exactly what we saw after 1980 in the solar industry. As the private sector lacked the resources to scale solar production, Washington slashed its support, and the industry went cold. The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible. No private company could orchestrate the national production of penicillin in World War II, so OSRD did it. No private companies were close to putting a man on the moon in the 1960s, so NASA did it.48