"Yang's Pit BBQ"... I mean, stranger things have happened before. All the local "Chinese" buffets have Latinos in the kitchen. "Andy's Rib Shack" rolls off the tongue a bit better. In any case, Yang's base probably microbrews at home anyway.
Bribery. Direct vs. indirect. It's been indirect at various levels of intensity for well over a century. We've crossed the Rubicon.
The nature of the state is that the manner in which things are regulated, taxed, and financed have always created winners and losers. If you want to claim that winners are getting "indirectly bribed" to uphold a way of being, then we have to go back further than a century, frankly. We have to go back to the very foundation of a nation state, or even further than that to tribe, millennia. The moment a group of Neanderthals came together, formed a tribe, and appointed a leader or chief or group of elders that ran things in ways that were better for some than for others, that's how far back we can go for the foundation of "indirect bribery". I think human collectives, which in it's more modern forms have taken the form of the state, have achieved a lot, and "indirect bribery" is part of those systems. Democracy is built on the idea that the members of these collectives can figure out for themselves how they'd like these systems to run. "Indirect bribery" is part of that, but we've seen a lot of evidence that people can form ideologies that don't necessarily line up with pure self-interest or grabbing the biggest slice of the "indirect bribery" pie. Tipping the scales with direct bribery crosses a line in a way which I don't think is healthy to a democracy. It's much more immediate and the chain of events that lead to you receiving a benefit is much clearer and more tangible. Democracy relies on people forming an abstract idea of how they'd ideally like the state to behave for the net benefit of the nation. You can't do that nearly as well if you're receiving a tangible benefit from Candidate X independent of that idealized abstraction.
I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the bribery: the indirect bribery is of the form of promising some sort of program in exchange for votes. The bribery is being done with the citizens' own money, with layers of administeria shaving pieces off, and the benefit diluted (with respect to the individual being bribed). The direct bribery is again being done with the citizens' own current and future tax seizures, just this time in the form of a direct cash payout. Make no mistake, both of these forms of bribery are using money that citizens already earned, so it's really a particularly mendacious form of bribery in either case. Now there is a further step that has been proposed that is both more honest and less "bribery-with-your-own-property": negative income tax, where the citizens' own property never ends up in the hands of the state in the first place (or at least only a minimal amount).
I'm not sure that's the correct approach. We can't start from a place of "your property being taken away from you", because the only reason it's your property is because the state enforces your right to own what it is you own. In a theoretical Hobbesian "State of Nature" then you can enforce for yourself what is or isn't your property and keep all of it. But we don't live in a State of Nature, we live in a society, which is better because now the state provides a framework for orderly and safe living. Part of that deal you make by living in said society is the state gets a portion of your wages and property so it can continue to enforce the rules and make sure everyone within the society receives a certain baseline of necessities. You get mechanisms by which to influence the state and participate in the collective decision-making process of the methods of taxation, programs, enforcement, and benefits. Overall I think it's a much better deal for you and I than a theoretical anarchist State of Nature. Therefore I disagree with your characterization of government programs as simply your own tax money coming back to you after skimming off the top. Government programs like welfare or a UBI are designed to redistribute wealth and help those who might need more help. Depending on your circumstances, you might be receiving more or less from these programs than you put in. But if you're receiving less from the redistributive programs, then you likely have more assets receiving protection from the state as certifiably yours, so you're still benefitting from the arrangement just from a different angle.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state", eh? I made a deal? When was this? Are there signed papers and a contract somewhere? Note: the state didn't decide to confiscate wages until 1913, and even then, it was minimal. Was there no society prior to that? Also, I am dubious of the seizure of property allowing the state to "continue to enforce the rules" and especially "to make sure everyone receives a certain baseline of necessities. Since the initiation of the War on Poverty in 1964, there hasn't been a whole lot of progress on that front in real terms. As to the "rules", I have a hard time agreeing that the vast expansion of "rules" is of actual benefit to most of this society that we have outside of preferred incumbent industry members and politicians and their hangers-on (i.e. lobbyists). Thank you, oh State, for allowing me the illusion of choice, at the small, small price of forcible and continued confiscation of significant portions of my duly-earned property! You can disagree all you want: it literally IS that. Wow, I had no idea! Thanks for the explanation! Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure how it improves the equation to use the produce of OTHER people to bribe still other persons. Again, where is this contract, the terms of which I knowingly apparently entered?
This feels to me like the heart of the debate, so I'm going to focus on this part here. There's such a thing as an implicit contract. I don't need to sign a contract when I sit down at a restaurant and eat something, but when I do that, I enter into an implicit contract that requires me to ask for the bill when I am finished, follow the rules of the restaurant, and put forth payment for the food before I leave. That meal I had was the culmination of a large amount of labor and materials and there was the implicit understanding that I had benefitted from it and I would therefore pay the required amount for it. So think of the restaurant as the nationstate and the food as every time you drive to work on state-maintained roads, every time your house burns down and state-employed fire departments hose it down, every time a cop protects you or your property from harm, every time a government regulator ensures the safe construction of buildings in your city, every time the visible or invisible hand of the state helps you, your co-workers, and your friends/family live their daily lives in an orderly and safe manner. Now look; you may not like the food and you may think it sucks or it's overpriced or it's unnecessary, but it is there, and you're still making use of it, so you gotta pay for it and follow the rules of the restaurant as long as you eat there. You can always go elsewhere if you want.
It's also a relationship you entered into knowingly as a person in search of sustenance at a price you were willing to pay, taking all that excess food and labor the restaurant was willing to sell into account. Aside from post-roads, who decreed that they be state-maintained? I grew up in an area where volunteer fire departments were pretty normal. So... The next time a cop actually protects my property from harm in anything but a purely reactive, damage-control way will be the very first. Police, despite the rhetoric, are not there for the protection or prevention of anything; they are there to investigate crime and detain violators of the law so that the courts can process them (in accordance with due process). I love that your theoretical constructions of all these things take only the best, least realized...well..."theoretical"...outcomes and apply them to all cases universally and under the assumption that there is no possible way of finding something equivalent "without the state". And every day, they make me a felon three times over. Except I'm in this restaurant not of my own volition. My continued presence here, now that I am an adult, suggests that I have acceded to the situation. Indeed, in fact, I am mostly OK with how things are if I drop all pretense of principle. That's - to use the parlance of the kids these days - my privilege. And it's yours that is driving your argument in favor of the status quo. Listen, I get the arguments for the state from your perspective: one that never knew anything but an all-intrusive, all-singing, all-dancing, indispensable government that probably didn't get in your way in a way you weren't equipped to stoically shrug off, and you didn't get in its way. I get that you seem to think that because it's always been there, it's always got to be there in the form in which you know it. But already we know that there has been a state that most certainly DID NOT confiscate wages for a significant portion of its history, yet you seem to accept that aspect as something that has always been around and always been effective. But effective as compared to what? You don't seem to grapple with that.
We can certainly discuss the merits of doing a variety of things "without the state", although I personally believe the state is indeed better-equipped than the market or the "state of nature" at some major elements of modern life. The state always has needed to tax its inhabitants in some form. I grant you the specific phenomenon of the income tax is relatively recent in the grand history of collective human action, and I guess we can have a debate around whether something like a sales tax is better, but I'm not sure of the point you're making here by banging me over the head with the idea that the income tax is new. I'm unsure if there's a large scale modern model of a successful society that hasn't required major state investment and intervention into the market. Theoretically it could be done I suppose, but I'm fairly skeptical. Overall, I've grown increasingly disenchanted with free-market libertarianism, a position I used to identify with a number of years ago. I just haven't seen a model of it that can account for any number of externalities like the environment or assisting the disabled, mentally ill, or down on their luck individuals struggling to find livable employment for any number of reasons. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but those are questions that I didn't have strong answers to when I was self-identifying as libertarian. Is my position coloured by my privilege, or my experience of the governments of Canada and California/the US respectively? Sure, but that doesn't invalidate my perspective.
What is missing in the discussion is that there is evidence that cash payment work better than programs like SNAP. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/welfare-reform-direct-cash-poor/407236/ The problem with not giving poor cash is it assumes that poor people are dumb and make bad choices which cause them to be poor. The research contradicts that both economically and socially/emotionally. And Andrew Yang, I believe, knows this. The disagreement I have with Yang on this, as I've noted somewhere, is that his proposed assistance should be limited to people who fall below x% of COL in whatever the given area is.
It's not necessarily that it's missing, it's just that it hasn't really come up. That faith in human choice/fact is precisely what is behind consquentialist libertarian arguments for a form of UBI (more of the form of radical tax reform along with "prebates"). This is why my categorization of the "bribery" as "more honest" is actually genuine and not necessarily a knock on the idea.
Yeah, but I will give YOU 1,000 dollars if you vote for me, is way more popular than I will give 1,000 dollars to poor people that really needed. 1 is seen as a freedom dividend by the Yangang fans, the other is seen as a give away to undesirables.
I am in general in favour of skin in the game being transparent. So where Trump promises "great health care" which actually means you losing your healthcare, IMO the $$ amount should be explicit in the vote. Ditto, bribes ought to be quantified I recall when i was young, a government campaigned on "tax cuts" which turned out to be a whole extra $11 per week for me (in my first job) It would have been good to have specific "what does this mean now" and projected numbers e.g given that the part charge on the doctor was $40, the tax cut was a bad deal in the short term for a young white collar worker
I think the core feature of Yang's campaign is to destroy means testing. As someone who grew up with a poor single mom who was on assistance at times, I couldn't agree more. Here's my main arguments : 1) Means testing is a trap. Imagine you get approved for assistance. You instantly become incentivized to do everything possible to keep that assistance. And this isn't because of laziness, like some conservatives argue. The real reason is fear. The scariest thing for a poor person is losing money. My mom was very determined to get out of poverty. Lots of hard work, suffering and trauma. It's exactly these types of people that means testing discriminates against. Means testing only works for people who are satisfied with their position. Anyone that has been in poverty understands that the most challenging part is climbing up the economic ladder. Every rung on the ladder comes with more work, more sacrifice, and more cost. That's the honest truth. It costs money to have a job. Transportation, nice clothes, nice hair stylist etc ... etc ...You don't suddenly stop being poor just because you got a $2 raise and now you're suddenly earning just above the qualification line. In many ways that's the most challenging point. And it's exactly at this critical point that our system abandons people. 2) Means testing is degrading. This is the reason why millions of poor people in America live with no assistance. It's degrading to go to a welfare office and beg for help. 3) Means testing takes time. Again, people that have actually lived through poverty understand how challenging time can be. Minimum wage jobs don't typically give you paid leave. What we're telling poor people to do is to sacrifice time and effort towards filling out forms and going to welfare offices. This adds another layer of stress to someone who is already at the limit. 4) Means testing requires a massive bureaucracy. It takes a lot of administrators and forms to supervise this system. Your income has to constantly be monitored. Another department has to monitor how you spend your money. Another department has to monitor whether you're trying to get a job. This means that the recipient is in constant contact with the system. The administrator to recipient ratio is absurd. A universal program requires almost zero bureaucracy. 5) Means testing has been weaponized against poor people by conservatives. When you give some poor people assistance but not others, you've created a political opening for those who hate the program. This has been the entire GOP strategy for decades, and it works. You turn hard working poor people who are just slightly above the welfare line against poor people who are slightly below the welfare line. That qualification line is literally a line that divides poor people and makes them less cohesive politically.
Gotta give Yang continued credit for being a genius promoter. He's as good as Trump, in his own (and better) way. He was atop the Yahoo! home page yesterday, and every single time he's there the stories are positive. This article was about how smart his promotion was because he raised $1 million in the next 24 hours. I'm having this guy promote my circus if he doesn't become President.* * None of which is to say that he's not smart, doesn't have good ideas, etc. But man, the guy can also play the game.
It's a risky move. Yang's unfavorable rating is likely going to go up. But Yang also had a very different problem in the favorability numbers. Too many people neutral or no opinion because they didn't know about his campaign. I've documented in this thread how absurdly biased the media has been towards trying to sideline his campaign. He needed to take a risk in order to break through the blockade. He's basically risking an uptick in unfavorable voters in order to get rid of the neutrals who have never heard of him. He's making a bet that he can lower the unfavorable voters over time after he breaks through the media blockade. He had to be bold because Iowa is getting closer and closer. Depending on the media to cover him proportionally to his polling was never going to work. And in that sense his plan has worked. He raised $1 million since the debate. More than 50,000 new Twitter followers. That's what his campaign needs right now. An audience so he can make his case. And if you notice, the media is covering him more now as well, so in a since this guerrilla marketing gimmick achieved exactly what it needed to.
Harris is pretty much done in at this point. Yang did well to get this far for sure, but I do wonder exactly how much further he'll go. UBI is still a wonky economist thought experiment moreso than a popular idea.
Tough. Iowa is older, whiter and less tech savvy. Iowa is also flooded by establishment money. Buttigieg has something like 20 campaign offices there. The airwaves are going to be flooded with ads. I think the Yang campaign is going to punt on Iowa because they don't have the money to compete at that level. I think they're focusing more on New Hampshire, a state that has a stronger anti establishment pattern. But Nevada is really the state best suited for Yang demographically if he can get that far.