Name: Point of View: Coronavirus makes one thing clear: Andrew Yang was right
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Point of View: Coronavirus makes one thing clear: Andrew Yang was right

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GUESTBy Calvin H. Warner In February, quixotic Democrat Andrew Yang dropped out of the presidential race after failing to stoke enough excitement for his Freedom Dividend, a form of universal basic income that would send $1,000 monthly checks to every American. Yang argued this payment was necessary to offset the coming displacement as automation and self-driving vehicles eviscerate common service and manufacturing jobs.Yang’s ideas were radical in February, but implemented by April as $1,200 stimulus checks hit most Americans’ bank accounts. The gloomy worries of automation displacing millions of workers now seem quaint compared with the economic damage wrought by the pandemic. But automation won’t be going away either — machines already had the advantage of not needing sleep, not taking vacations, not protesting their pay and not making mistakes. Now another advantage is much more salient — machines can’t get sick.The partisanship Yang critiqued (“not left, not right, forward,” he often said) is also on display in a more troublesome form than even he imagined. Our inability to process information outside of a political lens is no more evident than in the debates about masks or hydroxychloroquine. Somehow, critical questions of science are being decided in the political arena. The two-party system is plainly failing us, but there is no clear way out of its grip.Democrats too often lean on adding another layer of bureaucracy and regulation to fix every problem, and this made Yang’s laissez faire approach of a universal basic income refreshing. The natural critique of giving every citizen $1,000 a month is accountability. But now that we’ve seen how the coronavirus relief was distributed (or more accurately, haven’t seen — hundreds of billions in federal loans are being passed out behind closed doors), it’s clear that the current system of aid is designed to be plundered by corporate raiders before any money reaches the people.It might help matters if a strong, independent media would protest the serious problem of political partisanship, but they have profit incentives to collect clicks and page views and to cater to their audience, not to objectively tackle nuanced issues. This is likely why so many national outlets are pumping out think pieces universally concluding that President Donald Trump is a unique threat to mankind and pounding the war drums of coronavirus mania (or, of course, ignoring the serious flaws in the administration and downplaying the realities of the coronavirus). Media is not rewarded for traveling the middle ground, so the left and the right each have their own news outlets reinforcing their views with a curated set of facts.The virus has exposed the weaknesses in our health care infrastructure, our economy, our politics and our media. What will we do to fix it? When the next Andrew Yang comes along, will we be smart enough to listen?Warner, an Edmond native, is a third-year law student at Vanderbilt University.

GUESTBy Calvin H. Warner In February, quixotic Democrat Andrew Yang dropped out of the presidential race after failing to stoke enough excitement for his Freedom Dividend, a form of universal basic income that would send $1,000 monthly checks to every American. Yang argued this payment was necessary to offset the coming displacement as automation and self-driving vehicles eviscerate common service and manufacturing jobs.Yang’s ideas were radical in February, but implemented by April as $1,200 stimulus checks hit most Americans’ bank accounts. The gloomy worries of automation displacing...

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Point of View: Coronavirus makes one thing clear: Andrew Yang was right

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