For the most part, the campaign of Andrew Yang has cooked up that perfect blend of inspiring, vaporware, and buzzwords we’ve come to expect from both the business community and the gold rush cities of California. Buzzwords because naming a new radioactive isotope does not negate the power a Dyson sphere (advanced solar panels) hold over fusion scooping (advanced nuclear power) for a Kardashev 2 society. Vaporware because demonstrating Universal Basic Income (UBI) live on national television is not the same thing as hosting a nationally televised ENTER TO WIN prize drawing of the breed that should have died off with the 1990’s shopping malls. And inspiring because his general kindness, matter-of-factness and helpful nuance in diagnosing economic problems (which, by the way, are far more political than deterministic: if you ban A.I. it ceases to become an economic problem and Zuckerberg more than anyone knows this, however big a game he talks about Facebook being a government in its own right and however much Yang has become his white knight) find themselves embodied in the voice of a calm, salient Asian. At very least Yang offers an important piece of representation on a national stage that inspires my Asian friends (mostly Korean and Chinese in my case) alongside the rags-to-riches coders I know here in New York.

That said, one moment from the last debate notwithstanding, Yang’s typical understanding of UBI — at least in how he both practices and preaches it 90% of the time — is wrong. Full stop. Tax-funded dividends will not work. They won’t work not because the poor cannot figure out how best to use their resources – plenty of micro-finance and microgrant programs have proved they can and do as well and often better than their billionaire neighbors. And UBI won’t work not because the rich don’t need, morally, to give up their resources. Jesus, for starters, said as much. The negative corollary – populist riots and bloody coups – tend to agree in the historical record. Even Bloomberg has said as much (though he seems to forget that violent police presence often exacerbates the matter). 

Rather, UBI won’t work simply because the way we think about property is wrong: our understanding is both logically and morally inconsistent. And that leads to some silly conclusions when it comes to redistribution.

Obviously private property is a good – moral, sociological, and perceived throughout history. But private property has an inherent problem if it’s only an external checkbox for legal-but-evil technocrats to tick off. You see it in the Tanakh – the Old Testament – when people would read “do not steal,” the foundation of both generosity and private property, while skipping over “do not covet.” High School kids do this all the time when a chaperone buys them pizza, tells them not to steal someone else’s slice, and then subsequently respond by licking every slice. “Do not steal” must be tempered by “do not covet” precisely because the idea of private property is not permission to claim as much land and resources, natural or unnatural or intellectual, as you can before some other invitee arrives at the party a few minutes late. There’s a reason the ancient Jews followed up both commands with the idea of the Sabbath year (forgiving debt) that climaxed in the year of Jubilee (restoring natural resources). In the Sabbath year, all debt was forgiven and it was so important that the rich were exhorted to refrain from saying: the New Year’s next week, I shouldn’t offer a loan because it’ll be forgiven next year. And those were loans under 1% — remember, usury’s a sin. But after seven Sabbath years, you get the Sabbath of Sabbaths: the year of Jubilee when the original birthright – the original core resources – went back proportionately to those under oppression in the family line. Reparations, in other words, but a proportionate reparations and based on the resource of those in the land. In our day and age, it might look something like reparations proportionately distributed to decendents of African slaves, hispanic undocumented workers, Chinese rail workers, and the sort of “White Trash” that fled the Gaelic genocide, and so forth, though I’m no statistician, so I couldn’t begin to assign this property properly. The point is the metaphor: complete debt forgiveness followed by proportionate redistribution of the underlying property, not the produce, for the sake of the seventh generation and the land itself.

When I talked about this with the playwright Dick Reichman in Anchorage, he said that it’s almost as if the idea of property has this inherent gravity tucked inside of it that inherently concentrates, that the Paredo distribution remains inherent to the idea when people get involved and begin using compound interest, and only if you go a whit deeper into the moral, spiritual idea behind property – the right to life, the right to inherit the earth as one of God’s meek – do you start to see how we need “do not covet” to temper “do not steal.” The criminal consequences of theft are insufficient to fill up that hollowed out idea of personal property. You actually need a moral consequence. A humanizing of your poor neighbor.

It takes the idea of commons. You need first to make more, not less, private property available to as many people as possible and you need public property like national parks — the great conservative Teddy Roosevelt pioneered the modern version of this. But you also need a third category: a commons managed for the maximum benefit of all citizens in a way that refuses to develop one resource at the expense of another. Then, when managed well, said commons ought to pay out royalties to all citizens. 

Regarding developing one resource at the expense of another, it’s quite like how oil got into the single source aquifers of both Erin Brokovitch’s and also of my own home town (my forthcoming debut novel’s about oil in the midcentury in Southern Illinois). Few realize that it takes rainwater 10,000 years to get down into an aquifer. On the human timescale, that’s a nonrenewable resource. And at 70% of the human body and 70% of the earth, the water of a nonrenewable aquifer is far more important than the oil of brent crude. And yet we often develop oil wells at the expense of aquifers. And this is doubly egregious when we consider the thief-to-coveter spectrum: already rich oil companies rob from poor Southern Illinois and rob from poor Alaska and rob from poor Standing Rock – which, I’ll remind you, is the same damn land as Wounded Knee, same battle, same greed, same stolen birthright – in order to give to, say, already-rich Texas. So we have a habit of developing one resource at the expense of another for the maximum benefit of a few people that claimed mineral rights. Or air rights. Or whatever.

Commons approaches diverge from this. Hard. In Capitalism, the idea is to apply “do not steal” across the board while throwing aside “do not covet.” In that scenario, the first one to lick every slice of pizza wins the pie. The problem is after enough decades of this, you end up with one rich fat pizza lover (perhaps John H. Schatter?), a couple with a slice apiece, and the rest of the room half starving because they have to divide a slice among them. 

In communism and socialism (the means of production, the means of power), you apply “do not covet” across the board while throwing aside “do not steal.” The individual loses the dignity of private property on the altar of common property and therefore you end up with a similar wealth and power concentration, only in this instance it’s the government and not a multinational corporation like Apple or Verizon or Exxon controlling the honeypot. It’s Putin. Or Castro. 

Simply put, Capitalism says greed is good because the individual is God. Communism says greed doesn’t exist because the individual doesn’t exist.

Commons ideology, however, preserves the virtues of both by denying the conclusions of both.

Commons ideology — unfortunately it sounds the same as communism but is more aptly called distributism — assumes that private property exists and should be preserved, but should be preserved precisely by (1) distributing it and preserving it as broadly as possible, (2) creating public property, and (3) preserving properties owned “in common” by the people to be managed for the benefit of all people. Another way of saying it at is that some properties and resources are never owned, in the Native American and Alaska Native way of saying it, by anyone because they fundamentally cannot be owned. Who owns the ocean? Who owns space? Who owns the idea of a rainbow? 

Or, as the title of Governor Hickle’s book went, Who Owns America? For Wally Hickle was a Catholic and operated under the baseline assumptions present in Pope Leo’s encylcical about distributism, the ideology that Chesterton championed when an identical conflict between socialism and capitalism threatened to tear about the West a hundred years ago. Governor Hickle took that assumption and, along with the other draftsmen of the Alaska constitution, made sure that the state of Alaska was owned by Alaskans. Coupled with Governor Hammond’s work (as illuminated in the Dick Reichman’s and Paul Brown’s play The Ticket), they licensed royalties for oil, gold, fish and the like which goes into a permanent fund. That fund earns money on the global economy and then pays out dividends to every Alaskan citizen every year. Norway took this model and built a trillion dollar pension fund for Norwegians using their oil. Botswana did this with their diamond mines. Goa India took the model and did it with their steel. The opposite is Firestone stealing the rubber birthright out from under the Liberians, the Dakota Access pipeline developed the tar sands at the expense of the aquifer the water protectors fought to protect, or — on the communist side — Stalin doing something similar with the reclaiming of the birthright lands out from under the local farmers via massacre.

Commons ideology gave us the Boston commons. It gave us a relatively well preserved Maine fishery. 

Capitalism gave away the rights to the radio waves to a handful of radio companies – waves on the same spectrum as light, which remains as absurd as if Disney owned the rights to the color blue or Comedy Central owned the rights to the sound of anyone farting.

The best of Yang’s economic experiment, therefore, came when at the last debate he considers our data to be our inherent birthright as a natural resource, when he treats our data as something to be stewarded for the maximum benefit of all people. You could easily bundle it together and take all the money made off of royalty licensing earned from Facebook and Google, dump it into our commons fund, and then pay out dividends to all American citizens off of the earnings. But it’s not just data. It’s the atmosphere. It’s Mars. It’s space. Annual dividends paid out of the commons — of that which we fundamentally own or fundamentally cannot own — could make Yang’s wealth-tax-based dividend look like chump change.

The cobbling up of rights to those things which – fundamentally – cannot be owned is favoring “thou shalt not steal” over “thou shalt not covet.” Don’t covet your neighbors data, your neighbor’s slice of Mars, your neighbor’s experience of the color blue or FM stations, and so on. 

Again, Capitalists say greed is good. Socialists deny it exists. Universal Basic Income as Yang pitches it most often is little more than proper communism: it’s simply a redistributing tax.

Bernie gets this. It’s why he focuses so much on restoring ownership to the employees of businesses and, specifically, restoring ownership of the birthrights of local communities back to those communities and away from multinational corporations that have stolen water, wood, wine, and oil. Bernie’s implementation of modern economic theory beats out Yang’s communistic approach to a universal basic income – you’ll realize that UBI is supported and purported by those who have hoarded data that does not belong to them, who have hoarded artificial intelligence built off of literature in our public domain, and who have built real empires on meaningless applications of our quite meaningful information and thought and social lives. Modern Economic Theory, rather, treats the economy less like a house. In home economics, we focus heavily on personal debt and the like. MET treats the economy more like a small business – specifically a small community owned mutual savings bank, a local credit union. In this scenario, we make a deposit into the economy as an investment that later manifests into tangibles assets like the roads, bridges, subway systems, and spaceports that corporations, governments, and individuals use to thrive. Those make it possible to earn more money and therefore more taxes. And in a commons system where the people own their local resources as well as have a stake in the management of those resources, they actually get direct dividends from the good management of their investments. Their birthright.

Modern economy theory, in other words, isn’t that modern. It’s actually quite Medieval: a pre-enclosure commons system, what was once called the King’s land. And we have a story for this, but the story gets mistold:

Robin Hood is not a story of communism. Or socialism. It’s a story of the commons.

For you have a people – a group of clients under the patronage of King Richard – who had their private lands. But they also had the king’s land. And the King went off to war and the Sheriff – mind, you a steward of the king – coveted and took over the King’s lands, the commons of the people, for his own personal gain. The people were forced deeper into the King’s land, into the woods, and from there staged an assault to take back the commons that it would once again benefit all of the people and not simply those who had consolidated it.

Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, in this context, is really about robbing from the rich robbers and giving to the land owned in common by all people, back to all people. Including the rich robbers. Rob from rich robbers and give to poor owners — and all owners — of the commons.

Thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not covet. Yang’s slip of the tongue in the last debate told it true: scrap UBI. It’s time for Jubilee.