Neetbux are the Opium of the Masses
Many alt-righters are jumping off the Trump train and jumping on the Yang train at the offer of $1000 crisp neetbux a month, fresh from the magic money machine. To be fair, some are ironic and some are accelerationist, but I think many are sincerely on board. I have no problem with jumping off the Trump train, given his dismal record so far, but the Yang train isn’t going anywhere good. Yang’s campaign proposal for a $1000/month universal basic income (UBI) is a terrible idea, and Yang’s other policy proposals are just as bad.
See What is UBI?.
Some people on the alt-right say that “Yang cares about white people”. This is retarded nonsense. He is a politician. He cares about votes and money.
To understand what is going on politically, you have to first understand that the democratic candidates are all just reacting to Trump in different ways. Politicians have no creativity, and almost never propose new ideas, because of course people generally hate new ideas (they make you think too much). Instead, politicians wrap up old ideas in new wrapping paper, and present them as new and exciting. Then, once they get elected, they generally ignore those ideas anyway. Obama is a great example of that general pattern. (Hope and change, infrastructure, smart grids, yada yada.) Trump was a little bit more interesting than the typical politician, but he has certainly failed to deliver on his promises.
Because Trump has become the focal point of cultural conflict, every Democratic candidate will be viewed as a response to the challenge of Trump and nationalism. Yang has staked out one particular response, which is less overtly antagonistic to Trump’s base, but is actually extremely condescending and dismissive of their concerns and long-term interests.
In the aftermath of the Trump election, those in the establishment and on the left consoled themselves with one of the following narratives:
- Trump supporters are evil deplorables and we must fight them to the death.
- The Russians hacked the election.
- Trump supporters are misguided and lashing out for economic reasons.
Of course, none of them considered the possibility that Trump supporters had good reasons, whether rational or intuitive, to oppose immigration. Since “racism is evil” and “immigration is good” are moral/religious commitments that cannot be questioned, they had to find some other way to explain the election result.
The winning narrative was “Muh Russians”, because it required the least change to the leftist and establishment worldviews. It didn’t require them to view the masses of Trump supporters as incurably evil, which would be a big challenge to their humanist worldviews, because people are supposed to be intrinsically good. They prefer to view Trump supporters as ignorant, but mostly not evil. If Trump supporters had some legitimate grievances, on the other hand, that would also be a problem for their worldviews, because they need white men to be responsible for everything, and because they don’t want to view whites or men as having any problems, just privilege. So the Russian meme, although ridiculous, won the day. However, the Russian narrative has not aged well, so it is losing its appeal. The view of Trump supporters as evil bigots, although popular with the Democratic base, is not going to win a presidential election. That’s why the economic narrative is making a comeback.
Yang is staking out the third position, and tying it to a techno-utopian fantasy of a post-scarcity future. His technocratic vision of society obviously strikes a chord with the masses. Capitalism isn’t cool at the moment, but woke corporate executives are cool, and dreams of robotic servants and hyperloops are even cooler. People love to believe that technology is a deus ex machina that can solve all of our problems.
Yang’s position is technocratic leftism in shiny new memetic packaging. The solution to social problems is wealth transfer to the poor, plus lots of top-down control (aka “management”). This view fits into the Humanist worldview, in which evil must be due to causes outside human nature. In this view, racism and xenophobia are evil, but they can be explained as due to poverty, the left’s favorite explanation for everything they view as bad. This is simply not true, but the truth does not fit into the Humanist worldview.
Yang dismisses the concerns of whites about immigration as an irrational response to economic problems, especially unemployment. See here, for example:
https://twitter.com/AndrewYangVFA/status/1056336299592966144
In Yang’s vision, lower class whites are losing their jobs to automation, and that’s making them anxious and causing them to reject immigration and multiculturalism. How do we fix this problem? His solution is to give everybody free money.
The truth is that lower class whites are losing their jobs to outsourcing and immigration far more than to automation. More importantly, the problems in the modern West are not primarily economic, and so there are no economic solutions to them. They are social, cultural, and even philosophical. Yang’s policies do not address any of the problems with modernity. Instead, they ignore and/or exacerbate those problems.
Take the breakdown of the family and sexual relationships. Will neetbux fix that? No, neetbux would make it worse, because government handouts would further reduce the economic dependence of women on men, and thus increase the imbalance in the sexual market.
What about mass immigration? Neetbux would make that worse too. Handing out free money would increase labor costs, and create a stronger incentive for more immigration. That would inevitably increase immigration, unless it was coupled to an anti-immigration policy, which of course it would not be. Also, every child born in the US, even to illegal immigrant parents, would be eligible for a lifetime supply of neetbux.
What about the opiate addiction problem? Giving people free money to spend on drugs is not likely to make that better.
Free money is itself like an opiate. Handing out free money would just make people more passive and obedient. It’s a form of social control. It creates an increased dependence on the government, and it creates a parent-child dynamic between the government and the citizen.
Of course, the money wouldn’t be free. It has to come from somewhere. Yang is proposing a new value-added tax. Such taxes impact the young, families, and the middle class disproportionately. Their only advantage is that they are relatively “flat”, not progressive. Everyone pays the same percentage. However, that is an advantage from my pro free-market perspective, not from the perspective Yang supposedly has. I don’t think value-added taxation is a good idea, because it punishes action that is good for society (adding value). It also requires a lot of book-keeping and can be evaded in various ways. Resource extraction and land use taxes are the best forms of taxation, possibly combined with a low flat income tax. User fees are also a good way for governments to collect revenue.
No matter how it is collected or created, the money won’t be free. It will come from the people, one or way or another. And it will mostly come from middle-class whites, not elites.
Will robots replace us? No, this is silly science fiction. Yang tweeted out a video of an upside down trash can on wheels, rolling down an aisle in Walmart, as evidence for this belief:
https://twitter.com/AndrewYangVFA/status/1105532783219408908
There might be further automation in certain industries, but I think the great wave of automation and industrialization is tapering off. It has been going on for well over a hundred years. In the early 1800s, roughly 80% of people in the US worked in agriculture. Most of those jobs disappeared because of automation. That didn’t cause 79% of the labor force to be idle. It made food cheaper and led to a huge increase in general prosperity.
Some people claim that automation is the cause of wages being stagnant over the past couple of decades, even though worker productivity has increased. They say this shows that automation is replacing labor. However there is a better explanation. Manufacturing processes that require a lot of human labor have been moved to China and other countries where labor is cheaper. That shows up as an increase in worker productivity in the US. It’s not so much that automation is replacing people. It’s that foreign labor is replacing American labor in labor intensive production processes. The Chinese don’t seem to be in danger of losing their jobs to automation, even though it can be installed in Chinese factories just as easily as it can be installed in American factories.
If there is a shortage of jobs, then surely stopping the importation of workers would be the best solution. Without immigration, we would have an aging population, so we would have fewer workers per capita. Under those circumstances, automation would be a blessing, because it would allow us to maintain the same standard of living for the population as a whole, even with fewer workers per capita.
There are other things we could do as well. One is reducing the legal liabilities associated with employment for employers. Hiring people is not just a cost for companies, it is also a risk. You can get sued for creating an unsafe workplace for transsexuals, or for not hiring the right proportions of blacks, Hispanics, and women, or for not paying them the right amounts, etc., etc. These risks encourage out-sourcing and automation to replace workers. We also need policies that reduce the number of women in the work force — especially educated, intelligent women. Right now there are many programs and policies that promote the replacement of male labor with female labor in traditionally male occupations.
Yang has some positively Orwellian proposals. For example:
In order to spur development, the government should issue a new currency – the Digital Social Credit – which can be converted into dollars and used to reward people and organizations who drive significant social value. This new currency would allow people to measure the amount of good that they have done through various programs and actions.
From: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/human-capitalism/.
This is basically a version of China’s social credit score, recast as a currency. I guess bureaucrats would judge the “goodness” of a person’s or organization’s actions and reward them accordingly. I’m sure they would use the best experts to decide what is good.
Yang is a fraud. His policies are terrible. But of course most people don’t care. They are hypnotized by $1000 crisp neetbux gently waved in front of their faces. Who wouldn’t love a politician who promises to give them free money?
Wouldn't his proposed UBI gut the current welfare system, and just make it so that the money automatically appears on your account without all the bureaucratic hassle, making it even cheaper and more efficient than traditional forms of welfare?
ReplyDeleteWhat is your opinion on negative income tax, and the idea that the phenomenon of learned helplessness stems not primarily from welfare induced laziness but its immediate punishment of you trying to leave it behind?
In his proposal, you can choose between welfare benefits or the UBI, so it wouldn't eliminate the welfare system. It would also massively increase government spending overall, by 2 to 3 trillion.
DeleteNegative income tax and UBI are both worse than traditional welfare, because traditional welfare can be tied to other requirements, such as looking for a job. Welfare also has a social stigma, which acts as a deterrent for a lot of people.
I believe in the general principle of balancing rights and responsibilities. Any welfare program should have strings attached (it should take away freedoms and/or impose new responsibilities).
"you can choose between welfare benefits or the UBI" that's only for current welfare recipients because it's impractical to try to force them into the new system.
Deletealso his UBI is only for adults, so you can't increase your share of UBI by having more children - although I haven't looked into his plan in detail to know whether there is a loophole.
Well, it's all hypothetical at this point, but I don't think Yang could just allow children to fall through the social safety net.
DeleteDo you think Richard Spencer is riding Yang's balls purely because of his NEET audience? Like a popular talking point to move on after the Trump train crashed with no survivors?
DeleteYeah, I think Spencer wants to be relevant. He also likes anything radical, and Yang is the most radical candidate, I guess, if you take him seriously.
DeleteYou've overcome the bogus pseudo-morality of libertarianism but not its dogmas of economics or arbeit macht frei slave philosophy. UBI is far more than an economic policy: it would change the entire nature of the system we live under, moving us away from capitalism and traditional socialism. This is a very rare instance where the interests of powerful factions within the oligarchy (especially the tech industry) align with the masses, albeit for very different reasons. The benefits of UBI are vast and numerous from an ethno-minoritarian or majoritarian perspective. Indeed, the list is far too exhaustive to post here.
ReplyDeleteI will post the list in two parts.
ReplyDeleteThe case for UBI
1. The only class that isn’t being heavily subsidised right now is the native “middle”: UBI changes that dramatically by directing trillions toward natives that would otherwise go to the “high” (bank bailouts, wars, tax cuts, pensions, medical) or the “low” (welfare, housing, education, medical).
2. Elimination of much of the parasitic, inefficient, self-serving pro-system welfare bureaucracy.
3. Welfare babies would become financial burdens rather than assets, reducing the birth-rates of single women in the underclass.
4. Much more time and energy to spend with family, friends and community while reducing financial and work-related stress, the frequency of affairs and family breakdown, increasing native birth-rates and social capital.
5. Much more time and energy for physical/intellectual development, personal tasks, leisure and social activities: more reading, writing, language-learning, music, art, dance, sex, cooking, camping, hiking, travelling, gym, martial arts and shooting.
6. People are far more likely to discover and be receptive toward anti-system ideas in their free time than at work, especially as UBI makes nationalism and paternalism/temperance more necessary and relevant.
7. Encourage the creation and growth of localized, self-sufficient communes/cults and small enterprises: smart people will pool their UBI and use it effectively, dumb people will squander it or use it ruinously and rich people have no use for it.
8. Reduce traffic and urban sprawl by lessening the financial incentive to work in cities, encouraging healthier, less criminal, more homogeneous, more communitarian, pro-family, much less expensive (low rent, cheaper goods, less “entertainment”, less need for a car) rural living.
I don't have time to go through every point, but basically you're just committing the free lunch fallacy: assuming that there is a magic source of wealth that simply needs to be distributed.
DeleteFor example, in (1) you say "The only class that isn’t being heavily subsidised right now is the native “middle”". I would dispute that, since it is the highest income earners who pay the majority of taxes. But regardless, the subsidy has to come from somewhere. If you believe that the lower and upper classes are currently subsidized by the labor of the middle class, then obviously you can't subsidize the middle class as well. You could eliminate subsidies at higher or lower levels, but UBI doesn't do that. And if you eliminated the subsidies to other classes, you would benefit the middle class without giving them the UBI.
Your list is basically just wishful thinking or fantasizing. You're not making economic arguments. You're just dreaming up a utopia and associating it with the concept of UBI.
The highest 10% of income earners pay the most income tax (which seems to undermine your argument that tax hikes to fund UBI would necessarily be borne by the middle) but the financial-corporate oligarchy manage to dodge enormous amounts of tax while receiving bailouts/subsidies to the tune of trillions whenever their incompetence or malice crashes the economy. They're also responsible for the wars to benefit elite special interests which send young White men to die and get seriously injured by the tens of thousands; another policy that costs trillions. The middle are the victims of an authoritarian parasitic overclass as well as a violent parasitic underclass who are incited against them for the benefit of the elite. This is why we have been seeing the hollowing out of the American middle-class for decades, if not generations and neoliberal policies have done nothing but heap on immiseration.
DeleteI don't assume any such magic money tree. Yang's policies would have cut various benefits and raised taxes. His plan wasn't perfect but it's not impossible to fund by any stretch of the imagination. If subsidies were cut for the low and taxes raised for the high, UBI would still be the best way to spend the money because it's an enormous transfer of wealth and freedom to the middle. You seem to believe that someone with 60 extra free hours a week (when you include all the hours preparing to get to work, getting to work, working, getting back from work, tying up loose ends after work and recovering from work, including winding down and getting to bed earlier and even this doesn't include potential overtime, we're way past 40 hours) much more energy and a guaranteed $1000 in the bank every month is less free than an exhausted wageslave drone who has to worry about being fired by his amoral capitalist or bureaucrat boss if he gets caught sharing a politically incorrect meme, inside or outside work hours.
All of my points can be defended on an individual basis. For example, some feminists oppose UBI because they correctly believe women would be more likely to drop out of the labour force to have children or care for them, which would boost male wages in absolute and relative terms and provide substantial economic security for families with an extra $24,000. Women would have a financial incentive (not to mention more time and energy) to be housewives and have children that the severely lack at the moment as wageslaves and I'm betting many would take advantage, especially as it would also reduce the costs of childcare and commuting to and from work everyday with a second car; massive burdens on the middle class. More women working at home would mean more healthier, less expensive home meals instead of eating out regularly and fewer affairs because wives and girlfriends wouldn't be subordinate to wealthy, powerful men at work or surrounded by male co-workers who they see as much as their husbands. I'm betting the cumulative effect of all this would be to improve family stability and raise the birth-rates of the middle significantly. These are basic economic-derived arguments that even dogmatic libertarians should be able to accept.
Did you read the post? "Yang is proposing a new value-added tax. Such taxes impact the young, families, and the middle class disproportionately." Key phrase: "value-added tax".
DeleteThe govt. could collect more revenue by simplifying the tax code, e.g. using a simple flat tax with no exemptions, deductions or loopholes. But they won't do that because politicians sell loopholes for funding. There's a political problem with democracy that has to be fixed first. There's also a fundamental limit on how much you can tax people. Look up "Laffer curve".
If you want to debate me in voice on this topic I'd be willing to do that. I don't want to spend time debating in comments.
Yang would have also exempted essentials from his VAT, making it more progressive and a UBI could be funded without a VAT anyway. This part of your critique is solely directed at Yang's method of funding rather than the UBI in itself. Yang justified a VAT as being harder to avoid than other forms of taxation for corporations like Amazon.
DeleteMany economists claim that maximum rate of income tax for revenue-maximising purposes is around 70%; well above the current highest marginal U.S. rate of 37%.
I'd be happy to debate you on this issue.
The entire blog post is about Yang and his proposals. It's not a generic critique of UBI. You obviously didn't bother reading it.
DeleteAdd me on skype and we can set up a debate: https://join.skype.com/invite/FBwcezMNAMdp
@Oliver Relivo, If you really want to reduce urban sprawl, then the solution is to replace all the taxes with land value tax. UBI is not necessary to do this, nor could it ever be as effective at reducing urban sprawl as LVT.
DeleteLVT would also eliminate the question whether UBI would increase rent or not. It is a proven economic theorem that Land Value Taxes cannot be passed onto the tenants. Since LVT would strongly incentivize increasing housing density, rather than punishing landlords for building more housing, the end result is that rents go down since property taxes are eliminated. Rents would decrease even further as the supply of housing increases since landlords would be incentivized to build more housing.
Land Value Taxes also include Pollution Taxes, which would also reduce traffic by making it more expensive, since traffic causes pollution.
Since Land Value Tax would decrease the cost of rent, the cost of living would also vary less by location, as housing would become more affordable regardless of whether it's a city or a rural area. This solves yet another problem relating to UBI since there would be less necessary to provide differing UBIs depending on the recipient's place of residence.
Funding UBI with LVT would also reduce the decrease in production that UBI would cause, since land value taxes do not punish people for doing labor.
I don't think I support UBI, but I will say that if UBI is ever going to work, then it needs to be funded by Land Value Tax, and there needs to be Eugenic Population Control in place, lest it only accelerate the collapse of modern civilization.
9. Increase business costs (higher taxes, more worker turnover and replacement/training costs, fewer hours worked, less employment, lower human capital, destigmatise NEETism, more social opportunities outside work, tighter labour markets and more public bargaining power boosts wages and conditions in less desirable jobs) reduce the production of goods and services, reduce business revenue (mild price inflation lowers demand, more unemployment/underemployment means less income for consumerism) and reduce available and potential tax revenue for destructive policies.
ReplyDelete10. Incentivise economic migrants to leave and disincentivise more from coming by reducing GDP and the range/quality of public services.
11. Higher taxes to fund UBI deter rootless/alien investors and occupiers from migrating and encourage their emigration, increasing native predominance and further reducing GDP and tax revenue.
12. As taxes increase to fund UBI, reducing your working hours or quitting altogether to live more frugally and socially becomes a more attractive option, undermining the consumer economy, alternative government spending, “education” and wage slavery to politically correct organisations.
13. Harden public attitudes against immigration, soften them toward deportation, reduce native “middle” emigration and incentivise politicians to tighten citizenship requirements.
14. Increase social, economic and political autonomy and expression by preventing amoral bosses and pro-system snitches from ruining dissidents financially.
15. Disproportionately discourage female workforce participation (especially in undesirable fields of employment) boost men’s wages, reduce real estate prices, financially reward housewives for their labour, disproportionately lessen the burden of non-household labour (time, energy) on women and raise the financial incentive (+$24,000 for a couple vs +$12,000 single) to pair-up and have children.
16. Undermine system brainwashing, improve household finances, lessen the accumulation of anti-natal debt and strengthen family bonds by reducing university enrolment, promoting renting from relatives, keeping child and elderly care within the family and enabling more homeschooling.
17. Undermine liberal-conservative and socialist parties, trade unions and private charities by reducing full-time labour force participation, disposable income, poverty and economic inequality.