So, I've been reading a lot of books lately. Mostly about anti work politics, basic income, etc. And, honestly, I see a lot of Yang's politics being represented in many of them in some form. Not exactly, but I get the idea Yang read the same stuff and came to similar conclusions. The thing is, what is being proposed in the backdrop of Yang's ideology is radical. It really is. It is a fundamental revisioning of society. But, the left does not give him enough credit. Now, to some extent I understand the points made by the left, occasionally even agreeing with them, but at the same time, I think that they misunderstand Yang's actual ideology, and seem to think he's to the right of where he actually is. And I think the big misunderstanding comes from the fact that the two camps talk past each other on ideology. Yang fails to meet many traditional left wing purity tests, which is why he gets so much crap. But, at the same time, perhaps that version of the left doesn't have a monopoly on progressive politics and that maybe there is room for disagreement.
The pros and cons of the traditional left
I'm referring to the left nebulously, but largely, I'm referring to the reddit left. That is, anything ranging from Bernie supporters to socialists. The dirtbag left. People who range from identifying nominally as socialist, but are actually social democratic, to being actual socialists.
I'm going to be honest, while I've been taking swipes at the left lately, I tend to largely respect the left. At least far more than I do neoliberals and conservatives. The reason I get along with the left at times is because I feel like, despite whatever differences I have in ideology or our desired end goals, I don't doubt their conviction. I believe the left actually wants to make the world a better place. I think that, much like me, they see serious problems with the world as it is, and have an insatiable drive to fix it and improve it. They know that our system is fundamentally flawed and broken, and they actually wanna do something about it.
And this is why I tend to align a lot with the left in elections. Simply wanting to do something about the problems gets me interested. I'm willing to work with honest actors toward mutually beneficial goals, and I believe the left wants to accomplish far more than either the right, or the neoliberal left ever want to do. As I said, mainstream liberalism is simply interested in preserving their version of the status quo, for better or for worse, while the right is full on regressive.
I may not agree with all of the solutions of the left, or at the least they're not my ideal approach to the issue. But at least they wanna do something. The $15 minimum wage is an attempt to ensure that workers actually can live on the wages they work, after working 40 hours a week. Wow, pay your slaves? How novel. It should be common sense. If you expect people to work, you expect them to be paid for it. That's only fair. Same thing with jobs programs. They want guaranteed jobs for people. While I think jobism is inherently regressive in some ways, at least they understand that if you're going to be for making people work, you need to ensure that they have work to do. I'd rather cut people a check, but I at least can compromise with someone who wants to ensure that if we expect people to work, that they can work. Seems like common sense.
And a lot of left wing goals align with mine. I like medicare for all. I like free college. I mean, I believe those two policies in particular should work with UBI. I can even nominally support market socialism via worker coops.
However, that's not to say the traditional left is perfect. As I keep saying as of late, it has an old book problem. A lot of lefties get way too ideological, and way too rigid with their expectations. Given the environment, I kind of understand. The neolibs love to fake left and then run right. They understand Bernie's proposals are popular so they do this "how do you do fellow kids?" mentality in supporting Bernie-like ideas. But, unlike Bernie's ideas, their ideas are full of watered down compromises, poison pills, and they tend to abandon them after the election the way the democrats are now abandoning the $15 minimum wage. They don't mean it. So these lefties tend to attack people for not being as progressive as Bernie.
But much like an overactive immune system that tends to go crazy during allergy season, they tend to go after false positives too. They also tend to rip Yang. Sometimes their points are legit. I mean he did back away from Medicare for All, and he deserves criticism for that. But then they rip him for not being for a higher minimum wage, when he quite frankly doesn't need to be, if he's for UBI. They rip him for being a capitalist, not understanding he doesn't need to be a socialist to be progressive. They rip him for minor cringey stances for being anti BDS, and even worse, when I get into UBI type critiques, they strawman him relentlessly. I admit, Yang's UBI plan isnt perfect. I have issues with it. But I understand his issues are due to being inexperienced and making lazy/amateur mistakes with his UBI plans, rather than malice. Yes, he does want to get rid of welfare. Welfare sucks, why are you defending welfare. Yes, his approach to getting rid of welfare isn't ideal, and he did it in a lazy way. Yes, VAT is regressive, but as my own UBI plans indicate you realize you cant just raise $3 trillion from rich people only right? It needs to be a flat, broad based tax. And you realize UBI refunds lower income people for their taxes paid, right? Yes, conservatives used to be for UBI. And those conservatives were more progressive than neolibs today.
And it just gets worse and worse. I've seen Bernie supporters and socialists attack Yang for not being a literal revolutionary socialist who wants to seize the means of production. I see these guys argue a UBI is worthless due to inflation scare arguments and that we should "decommodify" the economy and implement a form of universal basic services instead (sounds like command economy style communism to me). And honestly, while we're on the subject, while I'm open to market socialism, as I've indicated many times before, I don't believe that socialism is all that great. Like, the forms of socialism that would radically transform society would have downsides like destroying markets and imposing government bureaucracy on people, and the forms that would work wouldn't have any more effect than, say, unions or UBI. If anything I think market socialism, in absence of other traditional left wing policies or UBI, may potentially do less than those other solutions, as they just subject individuals to tyranny by majority rather than tyranny by a boss or CEO. I mean if a democratic workplace decides to pollute the atmosphere or force employees to work 80 hours a week, does that make it any better than a boss doing it? And when I manage to get these socialists and Bernie supporters to support UBI, they end up being like "well it should be $2000-3000 a month". Okay, I just looked at that. That would impose a marginal tax rate of 40-60% on people ON TOP OF other taxes. It would destroy the economy. It would be unworkable. It would destroy all economic incentive based work ethic. It wouldn't work. Maybe some day in my futuristic Star Trek post scarcity economy, but not any time soon.
So, no. While I will align with the left in many elections, as I believe they actually do mean well and their policies can do good things, I don't necessarily align with them, nor do I think all of their ideas are always good, or that they should be pursued. Sometimes they get too purity focused, too ideological, and too unrealistic with where they wanna take things. Just like I said in my green new deal vs UBI article 2 years ago, we as progressives need to prioritize what we want. And sometimes progressives just come out with these unrealistic, unworkable wishlists that won't work in practice.
Pointing this out doesn't make me, or Yang, a neolib. Those guys don't wanna do anything and are effectively conservative. I'm progressive, but in a different way. And sometimes, less is more.
The brilliance of Yang's main economic platform in 2020
Andrew Yang ran primarily on three things.
Universal Basic Income
Medicare for All
Human Centered Capitalism
I'm going to be honest, while I don't always agree with how Yang wanted to implement those things (heck he totally lost me on his healthcare plan), on a pure ideological level, this is brilliant, and this is very similar to what my ideal platform is.
Universal basic income
Yang and I will agree that this should be the central idea for the economy. Maybe I'm a bit optimistic, but I think basic income is such a good idea, it is actually a bit of a silver bullet. It ends poverty, gives people more freedom, and so many benefits come from these two things. Yang likes it because he recognizes many areas of the country (such as my home town in Pennsylvania) are shedding jobs like crazy, and jobism and traditional ideologies are never going to bring them back. I also came to this conclusion. Heck, I'm one of those young people who dropped out of the work force he mentioned in his book, "The War on Normal People" (this is, by the way, what caused me to re-evaluate my life, and caused me to have that spiritual awakening 2 years ago). Yang...gets it. He understands no amount of traditional policy is gonna fix things, and rather than do things in this bureaucratic 20th century way that never really worked, we need new solutions. So he proposes UBI.
I admit, my ideology isn't exactly Yang's. Yang tends to be a bit more conservative, and pro work than I am. He accepts UBI and the hollowing out of the job market merely as a matter of facts and data, whereas I actually have come to encourage this stuff. I want to destroy the traditional work environment. I'm pro automation. Not as a matter of practicality, but I literally envision, and live for, and want to make happen, an economy where people are free from the tyrannies of work. And like Yang, we can agree on UBI as the solution to these structural problems.
That said, I'm way more aligned to Yang here, than I am to Bernie and the traditional left. The traditional left glorifies labor. It tends to promote higher wages, and unions, and regulations, and jobs programs. But it never questions the relationship between an individual and work in the first place. It just assumes it, and from my indepentarian perspective, merely proposes band aids on steroids. Yang understands a weakening of the link between work and income needs to happen. Yang seems more for it out of practicality, whereas I'm more for it out of actually wanting to end this coercive system. But either way, I can find way more common ground with Yang.
UBI not only gives people an income to live on, replacing the need for so many traditional left policies like welfare, and minimum wages, but it also gives people freedom and the power to say no. And with that power comes a replacement for the need for things like unions, and regulations, because if people dont want to work unsafe conditions, or exploitative conditions, they can say no. It's a market oriented solution that actually fixes much of what's wrong with capitalism. I admit, it isn't a silver bullet on everything, but I think people don't understand how revolutionary this idea actually is, and how because Yang is for this, he doesn't need to be for everything else. UBI is such a valuable policy, that it supercedes, in my opinion, many standard progressive priorities. It even is, in my opinion, more important than socialism, because what's better than tyranny by majority is being able to reject all coercion from all structures in the first place. That's why I can never wrap my head around socialists being so obsessed with socialism. UBI is actually superior to socialism in the effect it would have on peoples' lives.
Medicare for all
Okay, look, I know Yang tends to get a lot of crap for not really supporting medicare for all, but my opinion on this is that he shifted his opinion through the election due to public pressure. He originally was for single payer healthcare, the same as Bernie. Recognizing that jobs are not a good source of income and well being in the future, Yang recognizes government run healthcare is going to be needed to replace employer based healthcare over time. And me, being the explicitly anti work dude who wants to decouple these things, I also support single payer healthcare. That's the thing. I believe in his heart of hearts, Yang actually does believe in single payer healthcare.
However, Yang also has been convinced by some of his supporters, people coming in from campaigns other than Bernie's, that single payer isnt practical. I disagree, but yang has shifted on this. He is fairly naive and inexperienced and can be influenced at times, it is a weakness of his. But Yang's argument shifted to the idea that a public option is a necessary stepping stone to medicare for all. That if we can get a public option, we can hollow out the demand for private insurance and move toward a single payer system over time. I don't necessarily agree or endorse these views. I tend to agree with the Bernie camp that public option is a trojan horse to preserve the private system and would not have the effects at guaranteeing healthcare that a more aggressive idea would have. But Yang does support M4A in his heart of hearts, it appears.
M4A is a necessary expansion to the program toward a new paradigm decoupling income from work. Just like Medicare was needed for seniors on social security, medicare for all will be needed to supplement basic income. And Yang knows this, despite his willingness to compromise on the issue. That said, let me say this. If you have a candidate who supports UBI and M4A, you got my vote. Period. It doesnt matter what else you support, minimum wage, regulations, blah blah blah. If you can support these two things, you have met my requirements for a vote. Period. I admit, I ended up going for Bernie in 2020, but Yang was also off the ballot by then, and at the same time Yang didn't actually support M4A. If he did, I would likely have maintained my support.
But yeah, these two policies cover most of the progressive gamut as far as I'm concerned. You accomplish these two things, and you accomplish what would take an entire platform of technocratic fixes from a neoliberal or Sanders style democrat. You literally do more with less. Poverty would be eliminated, and people would have a degree of freedom to pursue their own happiness like has never existed in modern history. It would be a revolution of left wing politics as monumental to me, as FDR, or Reagan if you're a right winger.
But wait, there's more...
Human Centered Capitalism
Speaking of a monumental ideological shift, we need an actual ideology to go along with it. yang supports what he calls "human centered capitalism." This gets a lot of scoffing from socialists who think only socialism will save us and Yang being a capitalist means that his ideas are crap and not worth considering because capitalism is fundamentally evil and must be abolished, but again, socialists need to chill. Their ideas are either undesireable or unworkable or are mere band aids in my opinion. As someone who isn't so ideologically attached to socialism as an end all to politics, I believe human centered capitalism is a monumental shift that ushers in a fundamental rethinking of what the economy is. The best thing is, he speaks in terms of things that I've been saying for years.
The three main points of human centered capitalism are:
1) Humans are more important than money
2) The unit of a human capitalism economy is each person, not each dollar
3) Markets exist to serve our common goals and values
This is actually huge. A major criticism I've always had with ideological capitalism is that rather than seeing capitalism as existing for people, people exist for capitalism. And virtually every evil of capitalism follows from this. The greed, the exploitation, the long working hours. It serves to reduce every person to a mere slave to the economy. We subvert our lives for the accumulation of more wealth and GDP. Yang understand the economy should be about people, not the other way around, and this turns capitalism on its head.
From there, Yang's big push for human centered capitalism is shifting away from GDP as an end all for what the economy is, and toward a new array of metrics that measure human well being. Once again, this is huge. The obsession with economic growth, GDP, and maximal profits is much of what's wrong with capitalism. We forget that at the end of the day, all that really matters is if people are doing well. GDP is a good measure for production capabilities during war time, but it does not really represent everything that is good about life.
Yang seeks to establish an array of other measures to look at well being. While I don't necessarily agree with all of them, I think that replacing GDP with other measures could tell us a lot about the economy we don't currently know. Most measures as they exist now have certain ideological biases and norms, and are centered around stuff like the stock market, and GDP, and unemployment. Most of these measures are very misleading and don't tell the entire picture. Heck, capitalism as it exists seems to boil the human experience down to a few numbers that don't mean much of anything. There's so much more that isn't counted. Yang seems to turn capitalism on its head, and attempts to further refine it for the next generation. Rather than boil down everything to a struggle of capitalism vs socialism, a struggle that in my opinion doesn't make much sense in practice, Yang seeks to just do right by people.
Putting it all together
Yang's platform is, to me, huge. His views could be lifted right out of the book "Utopia for Realists" by Rutger Bregman. He also proposed ideas like basic income and moving away from GDP. Admittedly he also wanted stuff like open borders which I don't support (and neither does Yang), and a much shorter 15 hour work week (not opposed to but seems overly optimistic at this time), but regardless, I can see how Yang has been influenced.
The fact is, these three proposals really are utopia for realists. Basic income, medicare for all, and an ideological shift toward human centered capitalism is as radical of a shift as FDR's platform was in my opinion. It would do more good than literal market socialism. While this isn't inclusive of every proposal I would want implemented, it covers the vast majority of them, and this makes his platform about as progressive as Bernie's, who basically ran on FDR's second bill of rights.
Areas where human centered capitalism can be improved/expanded
Now, this is where I start agreeing with the Berniecrats again. While this platform covers the vast majority of the problems that we deal with under capitalism, and arguably does it better than Bernie, there are some areas where Bernie has solutions and Yang arguably lacks them.
Education- Yang was not for free college, whereas Bernie was. Free college is actually my third major priority as part of my own version of human centered capitalism, behind UBI and Medicare for all. The way I see it, UBI and M4A guarantee the basics of life, but education is essential too. Not only is an educated populace a more informed and free thinking populace, making it resistant against the threat of misinformation and demagogery (imagine how many votes Trump would've gotten if the entire country had a college education), but education is essential to opportunity. While I'm anti work, I understand social mobility is still important, and jobs are the vehicle for social mobility. In order to ensure social mobility, people need an education. Education should be a right and not a privilege, ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to get ahead. While no one should be forced to do labor, everyone should have the tools to educate themselves if they so choose to be able to do the jobs they want to do. We should be subsidizing college much like we did K-12 in the past. It's a logical extension of that. And yes, for working class dignity of work types, yes, trade school should be an option too. Not sure why some fetishize the trades so much, but yes, they're important jobs and part of educating people should be to educate them for the jobs they want, which include the trades. Not sure why we need to have this weird working class vs professional class spat over what education should be for. Why not both?
Housing- There are just some housing markets in this country that are so broken that no amount of markets will fix them. It's a supply and demand problem. People want to live in a certain area for jobs, and there's physically only so much space for people. Housing costs are expensive, and a UBI will not be able to properly fund this in some cases. While I imagine a family of UBI collectors could afford a reasonable below the median priced apartment fairly easily in many areas of the country, we need to boost the supply of affordable housing, and the government should arguably support the construction of cheap housing aimed explicitly for lower income folks who live on UBI and the like, and are appropriately priced for that demographic. These don't have to be big homes, more microhomes and small apartments if anything. Privatized housing has gotten insanely expensive and luxurious over the years and there isn't any place to live any more for the lower classes. Every major metropolis and even many smaller ones too should have a guaranteed housing program where they build and distribute microhomes/apartments to people at a lower price than the private market offers. It should arguably be funded by a land value tax too, which in itself will encourage more efficient land use leading to more apartments in a fixed area.
Climate change- Climate change is an existential threat to our way of life, and greenhouse gas emissions must be curbed. While Yang had an excellent 2020 climate plan, I do think some version of the green new deal is necessary to update infrastructure. I dont think we need to turn it into a glorified jobs guarantee, but I do support smaller scale implementations of the idea, similar to what Biden is trying to offer in his presidency. Combine that with Yang's already existing platform and we could do our part to reduce our carbon footprint.
Conclusion
Honestly, while I love the Bernie camp to some extent, being a two time Bernie supporter, Bernie does not have a monopoly on all progressive change, and the left really underestimates the potential of Yang's platform. While his approach to politics is not perfect, he hits the right notes on most major issues, and people really underestimate how progressive a combination of basic income, medicare for all, and human centered capitalism can be. Expand this slightly into other areas and it can be a platform superior to even what Sanders offered. I know Berniecrats, social democrats, socialists, etc., don't wanna hear it. They either think Bernie is the end all to all politics, or they think that socialism is the end all, but they're not. Bernie Sanders is FDR repackaged, which isn't necessarily a bad thing and an improvement over what both republicans and democrats offer, but we need a new ideology for the 21st century. And Yang's human centered capitalism does a good job establishing the template for it, even if it isn't quite perfected yet. I really think Yang's approach, with a little work, could be far superior to the Bernie approach. FDRism was great for its time, but its time was the 20th century. We're now in the 21st century and need a new way forward. Automation is upon us, technological gains are upon us, and even in the 1970s before Reagan came along and ruined everything, people realized the new deal american dream wasn't all it was cracked up to be. We need a new left. Maybe it will take some characteristics of Nixon's old liberal right at times, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as it works. As many UBI advocates like to say, it's not left or right, but forward, and while I would classify it as left in a "left is for forward, right is for backward" kind of way, these ideas are superior to virtually every mainstream ideology I've come across.
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