People pick up on what I’m putting down now
By Seriously, what the hell is this?
As presented, this is (to put it kindly) self-refuting:
America has already witnessed the largest federal job guarantee experiment known to history — the chore-performing middle schooler’s allowance. And he was miserable.— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) September 19, 2019
And, yet, as djw observed on Twitter it’s somehow even worse than the tweet suggests, starting with an opening roughly as plausible as a Penthouse Forum letter:
A few days ago, an extremely hot, cool, funny, and recently single friend of mine was scrolling Tinder, just looking to pull. The indignity of online dating reached its nadir when she was contacted by an Andrew Yang enthusiast, who proceeded to scoff at her support of full employment, rather than universal basic income.
He was unemployed, admitted to being mostly preoccupied with binge drinking, and he blithely admitted, “My life is pretty fucking empty.” Beyond the more obvious and unkind jokes about the sexual ineptitude of Extremely Online Millennial NEETS, the tragic cliché of the downwardly mobile lumpen failson has become a mascot of the Yang Gang. But what struck her most of all was his insistence that the demand for a worker-controlled economy was both naive and selfish — “unions aren’t coming back,” and “why talk about utopian visions and deny people an immediate material gain?”
Not wanting to continue such a fatalistic and decidedly unsexy conversation, my friend exited the exchange with a few terminal words, more out of pity than offense.
All the way through the punchline:
And besides, ladies love a workin’ man.
Excited for the forthcoming piece arguing that Elizabeth Warren is a neoliberal shill because she won’t endorse that well-known bedrock principle of socialism, “unemployed men receiving government assistance are unfuckable.”
This is a useful thread on the theoretical issues as stake, but of course to engage with this article as if it was policy analysis would be making a category error. The only actual point of the article is “Yang seems to appeal more to Bernie’s relatively young and nonpartisan base than to Warren or Biden’s”:
The real news here is that pro-Sanders folks are starting to infer (correctly, IMO) that Yang is drawing mostly from their column. It may be only 3%, but it's 3% that would be useful against Biden and Warren.— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 19, 2019
Well, why stop what clearly seems to be working?