American policy has been focused on enacting what the historian Lizabeth Cohen calls “A Consumers’ Republic.”31 It has been remarkably successful. Catastrophically successful. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We are interested in production more than consumption. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy. Abundance, as we define it, is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had. And so we are
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