Derek Thompson

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Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now. I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail. Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.