Andrew Yang vs. Aristotle: the Limits of U.B.I.

Andrew Yang's Universal basic income is
a proposed reform to government benefits I think that's the first clarification that's necessary for any discussion of this policy proposal and what it means in terms of poverty social inequality social justice whatever you want to do to try to sell or oversell this policy you have to recognize that what it is very fundamentally is a reform to food stamps a reform to social benefits and many many people since Milton Friedman I'm not saying Milton Freeman was the first but especially since Milton Friedman popularized it many many people have suggested that government intervention to help the poor would be made more effective if you simplified it and just gave poor people cash so stop giving them in government benefits like food stamps stop involving them in complex programs the lot of strings attached that have distorting effects in the economy and limit the choices they can make and make it hard for them to relocate from one place to another people who say keep it simple stupid what the poor need is money so therefore the government should give them money and then they argue in terms of efficiency or positive outcomes you're better off scrapping getting rid of a whole complex bureaucracy of helping the poor and just help the poor by handing them cash so that case can still be made the Cure is only going to be good relative to the illness if you live in a country that is unbelievably corrupt where the government programs interviewed help the poor are opaque and inefficient and difficult to access there are serious problems that the worse those problems are the more appealing the option will be of abolishing them and replacing them with tax now I think there are probably some countries in Europe that would say no we have really wonderful programs here that help the poor and this just isn't true it would be much worse for the poor if we got rid of these programs and just handed them cash however whether you're looking at first world countries or third world countries you could indeed have examples where the way the government is helping the poor is so counter product so corrupt so bad in various ways that it would better to replace them Akash so that's the kind of minimalist underselling of the program where all you say is hey this is a way of reforming social services for the poor this is a way of reforming food stamps and other benefits so that basically you're putting cash in people's pockets and letting them make the decisions but how they're gonna spend that cash to try to improve their lives whether that's to get out of poverty or go back to school or whatever it is they're gonna do um however the policy is being oversold is being presented as if this is an onion untested route to social justice greater economic equality the uplifting of the downtrodden class is the world and as if this is preparing humanity for transition to a troubling new future in which robots owned by a smaller and smaller number of multi-millionaire capitalists control more and more of the economy so the scaremongering tactics here is that somehow we now live in a technologically accelerated age and in this new age unlike the past there is a natural tendency for power and wealth to be accumulated in the hands of a small number of people who do not rely on many employees do not rely on mass employment and then those people just get richer and richer and everyone else is just paying a portion of their income of these people every time they make a purchase on Amazon some of that money is going to the master of robots and the robots scurry around the warehouse and you know the people buying these things are endlessly enriching this elite class of technologically enabled the rest of your hats what if you want to say yeah and supposedly this scenario is going to be cured by handing out $1,000 a month to every man woman and child in America well gee that sounds like a really complex problem with a suspiciously simple solution I'll tell you something else too this is a terrible example of new thinking the problem is not new the problem has been with us since Aristotle there was a time on this channel when people used to joke every time you mentions Cambodia take a shot of whiskey every time he mentions Laos take a drink of beer these days you could have a drinking game where you got to take a shot of whiskey every time I mention Aristotle I do recommend reading Aristotle I do not recommend drinking alcohol I'm a teetotaler I'm against all my dollar and drugs but hey Aristotle I am NOT just bitching him for the sake of it I genuinely and sincerely feel that Aristotle's politics in Aristotle's constitution of athens work like that it's really meaningful it really prefigures the questions and the even within that era ancient Greece they even tested out some of the possible answers to the problems we're still struggling with today okay so we're going to talk about poverty we're going to talk about government inventions to alleviate poverty we're going to talk about social inequality and I'm gonna talk about racism briefly because it helps to illustrate this same problem that existed since Aristotle in ancient Athens okay Canada was colonized by Europeans genocide 'el slave trading Europeans showed up and displaced the native people some of them were enslaved some of them were forced onto reservations they took the land and this is now much mythified and much celebrated there was a period of time in which white European conquistadors gave the land away for free things would be very different today if they had given the land back to the native people that conquered it from but no you literally signed up to have land given to you by the government and you had to be basically a white male European mother and it was debated it was debated how narrow the racial standards would be who who would and who wouldn't be allowed to apply for this free land I should also also mention really briefly Canada only embarked on that distribution aestethic ology after other methods failed earlier what they try were so-called colonisation corporations that actually wasn't the government's first method something similar is true in the United States by the way this normally comes up in history of slavery that there were several different models for how colonization should work and then the first two or three really didn't work out at all and then they're like okay hmm you can grow tobacco and slave Africans you know if they started to put together the pieces of what became you know the model of genocide all slave trading and export crop based exporting crops to Europe this combination of economic factors for how the continent was was colonized but in case giving away free land to people son that happened once right if you were of the right ethnic group at the right time in history you got land given to you and more recently if you were of the right ethnic group and you showed up you had the chance to to buy land at low low low prices centuries go by and guess what the descendants of these families still owned land they're still receiving rent some of that land is now worth billions of dollars and regardless of the the hypothetical value of the land if you sell it the land is generating income year after year after year through rent now the problem of rent rents basically all economic textbooks will say rent is irrational rent is economically irrational I'm not gonna digress into saying what that means if you have an apartment building on a small piece of land you're basically looking at technology amplifying a problem that already existed in ancient Athens in ancient Greece when Aristotle was alive okay arbitrarily a small number of people on land there they're making money from the land whether that's rent or farming or through something else but in our times rent it's really rent that's the terrifying technology here not robots no matter what happens the economy those people continue to get richer and richer the rent ears the rent collectors continue to get wealthier and wealthier and the people who pay the rent they may be the poor getting poorer they may you may have this you know classical formulation of the rich get richer the poor get poorer they may be successful middle-class people who enjoy their whole life they may not even complain about the rent but nevertheless a portion of their income every month is devoted to making the same wealthy aristocratic class wealthier and wealthier forever food stamps will not change this pattern offering people a cheaper admission to university offering them scholarships will not change this pattern giving people $1,000 a month Andrew Yang's universal basic income will not change this pattern if you live in Western Canada who do you pay rent to not the indigenous people what with that myriad government interventions to try to help are genuinely poor genuinely impressed genuinely downtrodden indigenous people a lot of government money going to them mysteriously the indigenous people never end up becoming the aristocrats again they never end up becoming the landowners you never end up redistributing the ownership of the land right so already in ancient Athens this was obvious to Aristotle that the most fundamental problem of democracy was that if you let the free market operate over time a small number of families would own all of the most valuable land whether the system started that way or whether it ended up that way after some number of decades or centuries right they would then be collecting rent from pretty much everybody else the rich and the poor it can have wealthy people paying rent middle-class people paying rent poor people everyone's paying rent not everyone is collecting rent and then you get in effect all of the defects of aristocracy oligarchy plutocracy ever you want to say and you have the illusion of opportunity within this system you know you can say to people who are in the disadvantaged ethnic group you could say to someone today whose Kree are a Jib way or den a or mohawk someone who's an indigenous person in canada you can say to them that they have the opportunity to become a dentist and that's true it's like okay today you have educational opportunities you have scholarships you have maybe some government money being put into this say hey look you can become a dentist and you can earn a good living that's true however when you just take a step back and look at the society as a whole when you look at the fundamental inequality and injustice that that society isn't based on they're two different things but they're related there's a question of injustice here there's also a question of inequality you have this aristocracy that for no good reason is remaining and it's not just static it's not just remaining clippo it's becoming more and more powerful over time regardless of how many people manage to lift themselves up out of poverty by becoming a dentist okay now yes there is some economic instability within capitalism some small number of poor people become dentists some small number of multi billionaires lose all their money because they make a bad choice of the stock market or they become a cocaine addicts I'm gonna invest and then once in a while some poor person who became a dentist took his money as a dentist and put it into real estate and ends up owning a whole bunch of condominium towers starts charging rents to people owns owns apartment goings and then they join that rentier class right so it is true it is not a completely static aristocracy however you have to recognize even if there are extraordinary individuals who are extraordinary in either their upward mobility or their downward mobility the same pattern perpetuates itself forever and ever unless and until you have political decisions you have government policies or you have a revolution that intentionally disrupts and destroys that pattern to replace it with something else replaced with something better and never forget aristocracy is a social system also had upward mobility aristocracy also had downward mobility there were aristocrats who went bankrupt who ended up poor and there were poor people who ended up crawling their way to the top of the pile in aristocracy if you read primary source historical documents they're full of examples of that I mean everyone likes to write stories about you know the self-made man even if it's rare within every society that has a massive literary corpus you get recorded examples of how people managed to get rich how people managed to get aristocratic titles whether through industry war even scientific inventions you know what about doing an extraordinary service to the king etc etc there were there were forms of upward social mobility in the medieval world and in every aristocracy that I know of Andrew Yang's proposal ultimately shows the futility of government subvention the misleading thing here is the concept of help if you hand out a thousand dollars per month to all the poor people do you help the poor yes if you provide cheap or free university education do you help the poor yes even in the United States is very significant employment in the military helps the poor it's probably the single most successful quote/unquote socialist policy within the United States is actually the u.s. military and all the healthcare benefits poor people get with that US military is a way out of poverty for for many many people in the United States of America [Music] unfortunately he helped as such is irrelevant to the more fundamental question that's raised by Aristotle who is to rule and who is to be ruled in this society okay we live in a society now which has been utterly lacking in the type of disruption the type of redistribution of land that Aristotle regarded as an integral part of every polity every political community as a fundamental obligation of democracy to redistribute wealth to prevent its accumulation in fewer and fewer hands and I'd point out that this is not an end in itself it's not the case that equality is desirable simply for abstract or arithmetic reasons okay this kind of equality which is never going to be an absolute acquire going to be a perfect equality this redistributionist approach to to coping with extreme inequality the the fundamental reason for it is that arbitrary and irrational wealth leads to arbitrary and irrational power and arbitrary and irrational powerlessness in society it leads to a kind of constant injustice that the society as a whole must inevitably want to rebel against that everyone even comfortable middle class people must in some way suffer to bear ok in the United States of America since the abolition of slavery you never redistributed land you know the famous phrase they never gave the African Americans 40 acres and a mule if you want the native people of Canada to really have an equal chance with the white wealthy people of Canada you would have to actually reaches tribute the land to them you would actually have to give them ownership of land and not in remote in worthless areas that were pushed out onto because the white people took all the land that had gold and all the land that was good for farming and all the land oh they wanted to build cities on you'd have to give them ownership of land in downtown Toronto and down Vancouver and actually have them enter into the the free market on that basis as landlords not as tenants paying rent and from my perspective race and ethnicity is ultimately meaningless it just provides a marker for the extent to which these irrational and arbitrary inequalities persist over time one of the fundamental reasons for the French Revolution I'm talking about first French Revolution 1789 was that people ceased to regard as virtuous the excuses made for aristocracy they ceased to think it was a wonderful thing to be ruled over by people whose ancestors happen to fight on the right side of a war that nobody could now remember 300 years earlier okay the idea of having a perpetual endowment of superior political rights on the basis of military heroism that your great-great-grandfather might have been responsible for that was no longer a morally coherent basis for the society they lived in and everyone wanted to rebelled against it by the same token the idea that extraordinary political privilege extraordinary political power should rest in the hands of someone because their great grand grandfather showed up at the right time to buy a corn field that today has a condominium tower on it in downtown Vancouver tell Metro the fact that you happen to be a blood descendent of someone who was in the right place at the right time to buy a land when it was worthless Linda today is worth billions of dollars and generates millions of dollars in rent year after year after year again rents being fundamentally economically irrational rent that fundamentally makes the rest of society poorer and makes a tiny elite richer and richer in a sense that is even more incoherent than the excuses for aristocracy in ages gone by