Libertarianism Is The True Abundance Ideology

Problems with Steve Teles' Abundance Group Taxonomy

I have great respect for Steve Teles. But I found his Varieties of Abundance essay frustrating.

In it, he sketches a sprawling typology of political factions that he says sit within the “Abundance” movement (or is it a mindset?) The inclusions and exclusions are difficult to explain.

The Abundance Conference (going on today) says in its mission statement:

What exists today is a cross-partisan coalition committed to accelerating economic growth, reinforcing American leadership in science and technology, dismantling bureaucratic inertia, restoring effective governance, and reducing the cost of living.

For Teles, abundance can be distilled as the political aspiration of escaping zero-sum traps. Rather than fighting over redistribution and scarcity, abundance emphasizes expanding supply to get more—whether of housing, healthcare, energy, innovation, or growth. The political task it thus presents is twofold: to dismantle or curb the power of incumbents who block entry and prevent growth, and to strengthen the state’s capacity to deliver efficiently on its legitimate functions. All fine as far as definitions go. But what follows is a conceptual muddle.

Into the abundance camp he places “Red Plenty” (socialists who want public investment and targeted deregulation), “Cascadian Abundance” (green, localist, zero-carbon politics), “Liberal Abundance” (YIMBY reforms and bureaucratic cleanup), “Moderate Abundance” (centrist pragmatism), “Abundance Dynamism” (markets plus state capacity), and “Dark Abundance” (tech accelerationism, fertility, superabundant energy). The net manages to be both too wide and too narrow.

What Counts as “Abundance”?

Teles stresses that abundance is not tied to a single coalition; it is “syncretic”—a dimension that cuts across ideologies. Yet if abundance at its most basic means prioritizing escape from zero-sum traps, then it surely cannot coexist with ideologies with scarcity mindsets at their core.

You can say you prioritize a politics of more supply, but if your policies are subject to conditions that inherently restrict supply then are you really for abundance? “Red” abundance ties supply to redistributive goals. “Cascadian” or green abundance makes it conditional on rapid decarbonization. Those are scarcity-preserving agendas.

In the absence of robust economic growth, directing activity towards one thing means accepting less of something else. Trade-offs are real, even for abundance-ists. The red and green groups he describes would inevitably make politics more zero-sum, not less, because their policies would harm growth. The fact that they may invoke abundance rhetoric, or embrace a few abundance-flavored policies in markets like housing, is beside the point.

Even on housing—the one area Teles says unites most abundance thinkers—the example falls apart. Zohran Mamdani may want zoning reform to increase the housing supply, but he also backs housing affordability quotas, prevailing wage mandates, “good cause” eviction laws, and expanded rent control. Each of those deters the supply of housing. So why is this a faction flying under the abundance banner? Because Mamdani uses some abundance-y buzzwords? Because he occasionally nods toward the private sector building more? If that’s the bar, the term loses all coherence.

The Libertarian Gap

The mystery of these groups’ inclusions make it all the more astonishing that Teles excludes the ideology that’s marched the abundance path for the last 300 years: classical liberalism, to which libertarianism is the modern heir.

Adam Smith’s “system of natural liberty” showed how free markets, guided by self-interest, deliver growth. In 1843, The Economist launched to advance free trade. By repealing the British corn laws and opening the country to foreign imports, lawmakers could grant Britons “the two-fold blessings of abundance and employment.” Bastiat mocked the anti-growth instinct with his parable of candlemakers demanding to blot out the sun.

Modern libertarians have continued bearing the torch for the pro-growth, supply-side benefits of deregulation, market-based capital allocation, open immigration, and limited government too.

Throughout the 2010s, it was mainly libertarians and classical liberals were writing about how supply, not demand constraints, were the key cause of slow growth and the cost of living crisis.

Libertarian thinkers like my colleague Marian Tupy have made the intellectual case against the environmental degrowth left for how open markets and liberal institutions generate a (super)abundance of important commodities.

On housing, libertarians are the only group I see who consistently advocate for both zoning reform and land-use planning liberalizations of urban growth boundaries, rather than having preconceived ideas for where development should occur. On healthcare, we have a long and storied history of objecting to supply constraints. On immigration….need I go on?

Almost all libertarians stress how government crowds out innovation—through subsidies that misallocate resources, licensing rules that choke off entry, or planning processes that stymie building. We have devised theories of how state-directed science can undermine innovation and growth. And libertarians have multiple theories for why government is inefficient: public choice, yes, but also the proliferation of objectives and functions under the modern Leviathan inevitably creates the “everything bagelism” that drives up costs of providing things like infrastructure.

Sure, if you believe the state is a major source of endogenous growth, you can dig around for specific examples of where libertarians might constrain abundance (say, opposition to eminent domain, or desiring cuts to net science funding). But, c’mon, on most margins, libertarians tack on fewer conditions or constraints on abundance than all these other groups. We take abundance seriously.

Teles might argue that his “Abundance Dynamism” and “Dark Abundance” groups have libertarian flavors—the former highlighting the role of dynamic markets in delivering abundance, the latter willing to downsize parts of the public sector. But as he notes, the first is far more open to extensive public infrastructure provision and government science funding than libertarians tend to be, while the second presses for various objectives that most libertarians are at best ambivalent about. So their existence doesn’t explain why there’s no “Libertarian Abundance” faction in its own right.

Maybe Teles thinks that, empirically, libertarian claims that their policies are pro-growth are wrong? But then why include red and green abundance factions that clearly lack such evidential backing?

Maybe Teles sees a willingness to embrace the good government can do as a prerequisite of abundance? But what started the abundance movement was a recognition that regulation and tack-on objectives and rules from governments impaired supply responses in key markets like housing, healthcare and energy. Libertarians have been thought-leaders on these issues for decades.

Perhaps Teles just can’t identify a meaningful number of libertarians willing to associate with the abundance movement? Yet there’s not that many people to point to who self-identify in that way for the “Dark Abundance” cohort either, but he was willing to theorize this group into the coalition. So why not traditional libertarians?

Abundance of What?

This might seem like a navel gazing complaint. But I think there is a substantive difference between “Libertarian Abundance” and all the other factions Teles identifies. The difference is why libertarianism has great claim to be the true abundance ideology.

Teles’s abundance camps ultimately converge on one overarching theme: they want reform and targeted deregulation so the state can achieve pre-set missions or socially desired objectives (affordable housing, decarbonization, universal childcare, more scientific breakthroughs, competing with China etc).

Genuine libertarian abundance is different in kind. It doesn’t ask, “How can the state achieve certain goals more efficiently?” It asks, “How can free people work together in markets to create breakthroughs no government committee could predict?” More simply: it’s not just the means of production being privately held that is important, but us privately determining the ends of production too. Libertarianism doesn’t want the government or some social goal determining what is worth producing.

In other words, Libertarian Abundance is not abundance tethered to any broader political ends, but abundance open-ended: a system designed to generate more wherever human ingenuity can take us.

Where other traditions see abundance as instrumental to achieving pre-chosen missions, libertarians see it as an emergent good in itself. Because human wants are diverse and unpredictable, no state planner can know the optimal direction of growth. The abundance we should seek is not the abundance of one thing—green energy, subsidized housing, or national champions—but the abundance of everything that individuals and entrepreneurs freely choose to create. Only markets can deliver that variety, and only libertarianism insists that this open-ended dynamism is a core benefit of their policy preferences.

Conclusion

If abundance is to mean anything, it surely cannot just be mood music layered over old ideological projects. If it truly means a politics of more, then libertarianism has been on the case for 300 years. To exclude libertarians while embracing groups whose policies would make politics more zero-sum is to invert the concept. Given the original impulse for the abundance movement is a recognition of how rules and regulations backfire and create scarcity in important sectors, it seems churlish not to acknowledge the group that has historically stood opposed to the vast majority of those very laws and regulations.