There's a lot of buzz in geek circles about 2020 US potus candidate Andrew Yang. Let me quickly explain why he's an idiot, and why voting for a true progressive like Warren or Sanders is much more thoughtful and caring and intelligent.
Yang currently, at the time of posting, has a policy set that has zero foreign policy discussion. Strike one against him! --- because US foreign policy directly impacts all citizens, not just the countries under military threat.
Secondly, he favours neoliberal technocratic policies, which are objectionable on several grounds, in particularly on spiritual grounds (if you are at all inclined towards humanism and not dehumanising machine takeover Singularity supremacy politics).
Thirdly, and for brevity finally for this post, he favours UBI as the way to deal with rising unemployment and bullshit jobs and machine automation. Here is what I wrote in a comment to a nice TMBS clip discussing Yang's policies on TMBS Ep.82:
UBI is shitty, it's a lack of imagination, it is dehumanising, and technocratic. UBI effectively robs people of dignity long term. Humans are not in competition with machine AI. Machine AI will make us freer. What you want is a Federal Job Guarantee programme to frictionlessly allow people to apply for living wage compensation for doing stuff they love. You can call anything people expend energy upon which is socially useful = "work". Expand the meaning of "work" and then we do not need to panic about robot AI overlords and a UBI. Depressing socially necessary wage-servitude work should eventually decline to just a few hours a week per worker, particularly once such jobs are shared --- think worker coops, not corporations with bosses. But that doesn't create any unemployment, since in free time people can still work at what they love, and get a JG income for it. Personally, (I'm a mathematical physicist) I'll be doing productive mathematics until I die, regardless of whether the robots are better at it and more prolific. More neoliberal market capitalism will thus probably kill me without a UBI, so believe me, I get where you Yang-philes are coming from, so democratic worker coop socialism is not the only way I live past about 60 yrs old, but for a lot of other people who are not self-directed workers there would be a huge social psychology cost to the lazy unimaginative "solution" of a UBI.
OK, having got that off my chest, the Yang-fans and Yang himself are not our enemies. They can probably be reasoned with, and brought over to a sane democratic socialism that respects human life and human spirituality, and rejects austere neoliberal paternalistic puritanical protestantism bullshit.
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