Debunking Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend (UBI)
A few years ago when I was in Bucharest, Romania, Vlad the Impaler’s home town, I heard the story of how Vlad dealt with unemployment. In Bucharest there was a bunch of layabout Romanian men not contributing to society, Vlad went to them and offered them jobs. Just one of the men the next day went to knock on the gates of Vlad’s castle and started his new job, the rest of the men where sitting around drinking Rakia and catcalling Romanian women I assume. Vlad then had the rest of the unemployed men slaughtered because they weren’t contributing and they might accept silver from the Turks to spy and undermine Romania. Today in Bucharest, Vlad is regarded as a hero because held back the conquest of Europe and Christendom by the Ottoman empire.
Me and VladI’m not saying that we should deal with unemployment in our society the way Vlad did but we need some balance between rationality and unbridled womanly compassion and altruism in addressing the impending challenge of technological unemployment.
I’ll critique some different points that he makes on the JRE interview and quote from my deep dive article on UBI
4:44 Andrew brings up the classic truck driver example. I’ve known truck drivers who figured out other skills. They’re not retarded. It’s still going to be 10–15 years before they are replaced by robots — that’s enough time for adults to make a career transition. We don’t need a giant statist solution to problems that adults should be solving for themselves.
7:55 The economics of UBI. He brings up Alaska — Alaska does pay a very small UBI but it comes from the productive state oil company (an industry that Andrew’s comrades on the left are hell bent on killing!) NOT from printing billions of dollars or raising taxes.
He says it’s going to be $3 trillion. I calculated that it’s going to cost at least $3,820,000,000,000. The important thing to understand about UBI as Andrew presents it here is that UBI is NOT just for Americans, it’s for Americans AND every other human being that can reach our borders who likes free money. UBI is a far left proposal, if it happens that will mean that far left politicians will have taken over the US government. If that happens you can be certain that we will become a border-less nation, which is of course an oxymoron. We’re going to have to pay another $360,000,000,000 yearly to the 30,000 million illegal immigrants in the US that will receive amnesty AND like I said every other person who can reach our open borders.
10:34 He brings up the argument that it will only have a net cost of $1.8 billion because we already spend so much on the welfare state — we’ll just replace the welfare state with UBI. Welfare is an entrenched, bureaucratic part of the government; the thousands of government employees who administrate the vast welfare system and the +100 million Americans who depend upon welfare are not going to simply go away. No, they will strike, protest and riot in the street while politicians and legislators argue for years on end about which welfare programs to cut and which to keep. We’re going to end up getting UBI PLUS the welfare state and under the leftist politicians who will enact UBI expect the welfare state to expand drastically , it will probably end up costing like $10 trillion.
29:29 I appreciate that he seems to have a little compassion for the reviled straight white males truckers who will be unemployed by robotic truckers.
35:00 He brings up immigration and says: Fact. Immigrants are NOT taking our jobs. This is just silly and defies basic economic supply and demand. You increase the supply of labor by 30 or 50 million immigrants and it will decrease the demand. Look at jobs like cashiers, retail employees, gas station attendants; they are often filled by immigrants. If we didn't have millions and millions of immigrants working in these jobs employers would need to offer more money to non-hyphenated Americans to fill these jobs. In the past young Americans would work in these jobs.
39:00 He mentions that not being able to pay your bills decreases your IQ by a whole 13 points. That’s interesting — I wish Joe Rogan would have a guest on who would speak honestly about IQ differences and how low IQ immigrants and dysgenic statist policies farm a lower IQ population. He also thinks UBI will solve racism and misogyny. This is silly…
UBI will divide us further down racial and tribal lines. In practice UBI will amount to the government taking a lot of money away from white men and giving it to people who racially and ideologically could not be more dissimilar and often don’t even speak the same language. In 2016, Trump and Brexit showed that white middle class people in the United States and UK are very resentful of the government redistributing their tax dollars to people who are culturally alien to them. UBI will be like dropping a nuke on the geopolitical battleground of the race wars which we now see burning in major cities in diverse western countries. If the government announces another giant program to redistribute wealth and resources, white guys will reach for their AR-15s.
43:00 He brings up that the birth rate has dropped precipitously in the US. If you want to understand this better just watch the first 5 minutes of the movie Idiocracy. Higher IQ people do not want to have children in this statist society. Under UBI it will become especially obvious to high IQ people with a long time preference (who can think 5 or 10 years into the future) that their children will have to struggle to survive in a country wrecked by statism that looks like Mogadishu in the movie Black Hawk Down.
52:00 He brings up that the most common job in America is retail work, the average retailer worker is a 39 year old woman with a high school. He asks what will those women do when Amazon further eliminates malls and local stores? Well, I have politically incorrect answer: women should be wives and mothers instead of cashiers making $11.99/hourly. Traditionalism is a viable solution technological unemployment.
UBI proponents are working under the assumption that society will utterly fall apart if all able bodied adults are not fully employed. If we look back into our not so distant past society got along quite well with a much smaller proportion of the population working and providing for the rest of society; that small proportion of the population that supported everyone else was men.
I’m not saying that women and elderly should be barred from having professional careers but if there’s a renaissance of traditional values and we realize as a society that it’s great folly to throw the nuclear family into the waste bin of history, the work force would shrink appreciably.
If society encouraged women to pursue their biological roles as opposed to demanding that they live and work just like men, the supply of labor would be cut nearly in half, driving up the demand and wages correspondingly.
1:02:00 Joe brings up a good point. $12,000 a year is not enough. It’s like applying a band aid to a gushing wound. That’s not going to assuage the mental angst that Joe the trucker struggles with when RoboTron takes his job.
1:19:00 Of course Andrew is pro-immigration. He especially advocates for high skilled immigration, for foreign students who study here to receive green cards to live here and become hyphenated Americans. High skilled immigration is debatably much worse than low skilled immigration, first they increase the labor supply for jobs like doctors and attorneys driving down the salaries across the board. And secondly, high skilled immigration badly hurts the countries that the immigrants are coming from. Guatemala needs the smartest, most competent Guatemalans to stay in Guatemala and be great doctors or entrepreneurs there. Currently, were are in this paradigm of global brain drain, where the top 5%-10% of most intelligent people from developing countries flee to the first world, their home countries just get worse and worse, further driving low or no skilled immigrants to join caravans and try to force their way into the US. $12,000 of free money a year is enough to motivate hundreds of millions of the world’s lowest IQ people to try their damnedest to cross our borders.
1:45:00 At the end of the interview he threatens war with Russia if they “interfere with our democracy”. So he can certainly count on the enthusiastic support of the military industrial complex who will invent whatever pretext is necessary to ignite World War III.
A lot of the comments on this interview expressed the sentiment hey this Andrew guy seems like a reasonable American guy! He doesn’t seem like a deranged leftist!
The problem is that even the most centrist leftists and reasonable seeming democrats will always acquiesce to the demands of their extremist comrades. Along with UBI we’ll get…
White privilege taxes.
More extreme identity politics.
More state enforced feminism.
More crazy persecution of straight males by the family court system discouraging men from forming families.
Increasingly legalized infanticide.
More LGBTQ propaganda shoved down the throats of children in public schools.
Totally open borders. ICE will be abolished. MS-13 gang members will be caught and released back into society.
Amnesty for 30 million illegal immigrants encouraging more caravans to force their way into our country. Amnesty begets more amnesty.
Multi-legalism; different legal standards for different identity groups, creeping sharia law and “criminal justice reform” that lets dangerous, violent criminals out of jail.
Abolishment of free speech and the second amendment right to bear arms and defend yourself.
Andrew’s Freedom Dividend is just another rebranding of international communism with a centralized giant global government running the economy.
Despite all these downsides to his proposal I don’t think Andrew is an evil communist plotting to destroy America. He probably thinks he’s saving American. He just doesn’t understand how far gone our country is and he’s probably unaware and uniformed about how statist policies have a powerful dysgenic effect on genes. You have to be pretty red pilled to understand that you can only have a prosperous, safe democratic country if your population has an IQ over 95. So please share this article with Andrew and perhaps he can adjust his policy to something that might actually preserve our country!
The current UBI proposal is tantamount to a guy who owns a lot of gold just leaving it on his front lawn and going inside to watch football and have a beer. It’s not going to be long before that gold is gone!
I further deconstruct UBI here and present some realistic solutions to technological unemployment…
Free Market “Universal Basic Income”