Andrew Yang

Updated 2,013 Days AgoPublic

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There are some good things about Andrew Yang. Notably, he's one of the only candidates to actually have a policy section of his website up in early 2019. That's laudable in a field where most of the candidates are doing their damndest to avoid being caught having any specifics whatsoever.

And his policies aren't terrible, necessarily. But they're an unfortunate combination of radical-sounding and woefully-insufficient that's probably summed up in his idea of "Human Capitalism". And of course his big thing is Universal Basic Income, which even gets its own big section in addition to the writeup of it under his policies section, which includes the following passage:

Isn’t this Communism/Socialism?

No. Communism is, by definition, a revolutionary movement to create a classless, moneyless, and stateless social order built upon shared ownership of production. With Socialism, the core principle is the nationalization of the means of production – i.e. the government seizes Amazon and Google. UBI is none of those things and actually fits so seamlessly into capitalism, it is projected to grow the economy $2.5 trillion in eight years.

Really, UBI is necessary for the continuation of capitalism through the automation wave and displacement of workers. Markets need consumers to sell things to. Universal Basic Income is capitalism with a floor that people cannot fall beneath.

His perspective on a fundamental basis seems to be not far from that of Elizabeth Warren, where Capitalism is good but just needs some felts put underneath it to stop it from scratching the hardwood.

It's worth mentioning that he's the favored candidate of Anime Nazis everywhere. And while it's not necessarily his fault, that's certainly unpromising. When Wikileaks in 2019 is tweeting how you're "winning the meme war", certainly you're probably appealing to the wrong people. And it's not hard to see why he'd be appealing to /pol/ Weebs, who would argue endlessly that communism is an obviously dumb idea but in arguing so much inevitably end up glomming onto seemingly-smart ideas that read like ersatz socialist policies to anyone without that "correct" perspective. Plus, many in that general milieu are feeling betrayed by Trump, and always want to be backing some candidate that the normies Don't Get.

Basically, he's the leftmost candidate that aligns with /pol/-style interests. Take another of his policies: using geoengineering to fight climate change. This is a classic asshole-who-thinks-he's-smart idea, which has been going around for ages now; there were cries throughout the 90s that we could just science our way out of global warming. Or howabout this: a 15 to 20% reduction in Federal employees, saying

Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, combined, employ around 750,000 individuals. The federal workforce is made up of 2.3 million individuals. That's too many.

Makes perfect sense, if you're a Libertarian asshole who loves well-actually-ing people. Seems like Yang might, in fact, deserve his fans.