When I saw there was an Asian guy in the mix for the Democrat President candidate, I thought maybe he'd win.
Asian is a minority.. but only sort of.
If you do the math and run the numbers they're a minority, ya. They just aren't so much "a minority".
They aren't i.e. trying to illegally enter the country and then regarded as disadvantaged and oppressed by the woke college kids.
So it would be a way to avoid the cis white male candidate, and hopefully not trigger the SJW wing of the party too bad, while not overtly playing the race or gender card.
Straight Asian male is almost like white.
Probably more white than a white female.
But it turns out he's UBI.
So he won't win.
I like Mr. Yang.
For better or worse, he's guided by his ideas and visions rather than he's fundamentally a politician.
I say he won't win not because UBI is a terrible idea (as far as using government power to seize and redistribute another person's property goes, UBI is a clean and crisp way to do that, I think).
But because it doesn't serve the entrenched interests.
Most (all?) of the things people think are designed to help the poor and provide a safety net are actually just sneaky ways to keep funneling money up top.
Minimum wage law is a good example.
McDonald's is known to lobby for a minimum wage law.
Why, you ask, do they want the government to restrict their options and force them to pay more for labor? Great question.
In a vacuum, they wouldn't want this.
But since everyone else also has to pay more for labor, they like it. Because they're in the best position to invest in labor saving technology, and win the game of automating a cheeseburger without much personal touch. So it's a sneaky way of driving out smaller, local competitors and tilting the landscape to favor the large multinational corporations.
It tilts it to a game they can win from afar, with marketing and distribution and an automatic procedure.
It's not a way of helping the poor. (The poor have less jobs because of it. And the poor have to pay more for a cheeseburger.)
So rather than wage laws, affordable housing acts, affordable health care acts, etc etc, all these things that approximate or hint at providing a safety net but really just spill a bunch of unintended consequence.. you could just give people money and actually have offered a safety net.
It just would no longer artificially favor the entrenched political interests who lobby the government, which was lowkey the point of all the things they pretend are helping the poor.
So UBI has no chance.
As far as handing out money goes,
they want the people who receive money to always be dependent and to always be wanting an element of power and control and to be afraid of what would happen if they were free.
If everyone gets a citizen dividend, there would no longer be this subservient class of people who in the back of their mind know that they need to keep demonstrating poverty to keep getting the free money.
There wouldn't be the dilemma of getting some fixed amount of money, but it goes away if you start having income.
Today what happens is if you get $1000/month for free, it's kind of a bad equation to take a job that would pay you $1200/month. Because then the $1000/month goes away and you'll be working full-time for a difference of $200/month.
Under UBI, people wouldn't get trapped in this way. It would be more like a safety trampoline rather than a net. People would always have the incentive to produce and grow on top of what they're given.
I'd rather more people realized that peaceful cooperation actually works, and that interfering with a person's economic freedom is bad and evolves into all these bad outcomes that we're afraid of.
But within the confines of being confused and trying to control-freak an economy and what you could expect to see in a Democrat political race, UBI seems relatively sane and decent.
Yang is way off about automation though.
He worries that automation replacing jobs will crush the middle-class.
Nope.
Top-heavy policies do that. Not tools and instruments.
To get the concept, just visualize the extreme where everything is automated and built by the robots. At this point there are no more jobs, but there's also no more cost.
Jobs are a means to an end of having the stuff.
If you can have the stuff for free, you don't need a job.
So if the extreme is fine, why isn't everywhere on the spectrum fine? Less remedial labor, but increasingly cheaper stuff and less need for that labor.
And then likely what happens is "jobs" become more about creatively using the technology, whether to service other people for profit or for your own sustainability.
Sure, automation will change the economy and our behaviors. But not knowing exactly how it will shake out doesn't mean you need to micro-manage or control-freak it.
(Not knowing how it plays out is exactly why it's bad to control and micro-manage it.)
We shouldn't want humanity's natural ark to be retarded down to whatever imagination problem a few people with guns might have in each passing moment.
What you really need is just open access to the technology.
You could get rid of patents and intellectual property. Get rid of all the rules that artificially favor the richest and the politically connected. And then everyone can use the technology in a fair and equal way.
So it's never that technology and having more tools than we had before is a bad thing, or is guilty of making the economy more top-heavy. Rather, having more tools and technology is empowering and a great thing for the average person.
It's just that to whatever extent our economy is already wonky and top-heavy, having better tools and an increased economic output will highlight that disparity.
Yang wants to keep the fundamental imbalance and then blame it on having more tools.
Believing it's good to micro-manage other people and their economic behavior is a vicious cycle that will always favor the entrenched and most politically connected interests.
It just becomes more obvious and more apparent that this has happened when our economic output increases by a bunch.