Supply-Side Progressivism Has a Fatal Flaw

The Democratic Party is in the midst of an important debate about the future of America’s political economy. Even as mainstream progressives campaign for further increasing public subsidies for medical care, housing, and higher education, a rising chorus of “supply-side progressives” is urging the left to focus instead on using the power of government to loosen the bottlenecks that make these goods so expensive and inaccessible in the first place. In a number of domains, supply-side progressives embrace prescriptions drawn from market liberalism, most notably in their calls for reforming stringent land-use restrictions that drive up the underlying cost of housing and liberalizing skilled immigration. But what separates supply-side progressives from supply-side conservatives is their enthusiasm for activist government. The movement is united by a belief in the need for a more venturesome and efficient administrative state, one capable of driving down the cost of building complex infrastructure projects and making visionary