Reason Magazine Tries to Downplay Andrew Yang’s PC Policies
1 May 2018; Andrew Yang, Democratic Presidential Candidate on centre stage during day one of Collision 2018 at Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Collision via Sportsfile
In a post for Reason Magazine titled “Andrew Yang: The Capitalist Candidate Championing a Universal Basic Income,” Billy Binion wrote that “Andrew Yang wants you to know: he’s not a socialist.”
Although Binion described Yang’s Universal Basic Income as “pie-in-the-sky idealism”, Binion re-assured readers of his supposed “affinity for capitalism”.
According to Binion, Yang’s “pragmatism” is what will make skeptics come over to his side.
Yang argues that his UBI scheme, the Freedom Dividend, would put “more people in a position where they can actually participate in a free market.”
Binion also tried to remind free-market skeptics that “economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray” all supported some form of UBI throughout their careers as free market intellectuals.
Yang sees the UBI as a “tech check” that will supposedly help the “retail workers, call center employees, and truck drivers who may increasingly find themselves without work in the coming years.”
To implement the UBI, Yang advocates for “centralizing health care costs and taxing tech giants like Amazon, who he says are automating jobs into oblivion and driving some stores across the country into the ground”.
However, when it comes to overhauling the current welfare system, Yang balked by saying that “You don’t want to take away benefits that hundreds of thousands of Americans are literally relying upon for their very survival.” Instead Yang, believes that the “goal is to create more positive incentives.”
Yang believes that welfare enrollment will ultimately decline over time “because many people in the Dividend would never find themselves in those programs.”
Although Yang’s campaign does offer some interesting insights on certain problems in the United States, his solutions leave a lot to be desired.
BLP reported how Andrew Yang’s UBI will likely discourage work and function like any other government program.
Real solutions to America’s economic problems involve getting the government completely out of the way. Trump got this started with his executive order to rollback Obama-era regulations. For free-marketers, this is the way to go.
Just because Andrew Yang is a capitalist does preclude him from embracing socialist policies.
British author Antony Sutton noted this in his book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution that “International finance prefers to deal with central governments. The last thing the banking community wants is laissez-faire economy and decentralized power because these would disperse power.”
Even socialist countries like present-day Venezuela have notable business interests that have benefited tremendously from the centralization of the economy at the expense of the rest of the population.
BLP has reported how America corporations have become increasingly hostile towards gun rights and right-wing dissenters in the last few years.
Given Yang’s track record of virtue signaling on race issues, his campaign is just another reminder that the entrepreneurial space has become consumed by political correctness culture.
Free-market advocates would be wise to stay away from the Yang Gang.
