If You Can’t Beat Them Buy Them

The Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants to buy Americans’ constitutional rights for $1,000 a month and legal drugs

Throughout my engineering career I traveled extensively to the Far East, to Japan and to Hong Kong, and got the chance to observe these cultures from up close. Two things struck me the most: their pragmatism and their utter disbelief in democracy or any kind of responsible or representative government. The Chinese and their derivative cultures look at the world through a very pragmatic lens. If there is a problem, devise a practical solution based on past experience. If that solution doesn’t work, tweak it until it does.

As far as their attitudes to government go, they are also nothing if not pragmatic. Government is where all the smart people go. Why do they go there? Because that’s where all the power is. Doesn’t being rich make you powerful? Yes, but not as powerful as the government, because the government can, at any time, take your money away, take your freedom away, take your life away. The idea that un-vetted and untested people, people with no credentials whatsoever should have a say in who governs them is utterly foreign to the Chinese and to a lesser degree to the Japanese.

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How do you know if you are smart enough to be in government? You take exams, that’s how. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Exams will tell you if you are government material or big business material, or, most likely, you are destined to muck it out with the rest of humanity.

“They”, the government are there and we the people are here. They know best, demonstrably, because they took and passed a series of exams that prove it. We cannot possibly understand, we are not physically capable of understanding, what the government does and why, so we’re just going to let it do what it does, and we will do what we do, which is survive.

Surprisingly or not, this is precisely the attitude of Silicon Valley oligarchs. If you haven’t invented something as amazing as PayPal and made billions when it was sold to another company or to the public, you cannot possibly be smart enough to know what’s good for you. A Silicon Valley “exit” is the ultimate exam. If you haven’t passed it, you have no business of knowing what works for you and what doesn’t, because you are simply incapable of doing so. It’s nothing personal, it’s just nature.

In America, Silicon Valley oligarchs, many of whom are indeed Asian, are encountering a problem. This problem manifested itself in the 2016 presidential election, when a large number of Americans, just about half, decided that they did not want to be governed by the person selected for them by the oligarchy. While this caused the uneducated and unsophisticated servants of the oligarchy, the journalists and the self-described “intelligence operatives” to engage in bizarre conspiracy theories, people like Andrew Yang approached the problem like any Asian would. They analyzed it and they found a solution.

The root of the problem, as I am certain Mr. Yang sees it, is that in America there is a large population of people of European descent who, through self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, failed to download software upgrades called “socialism” and “globalism”. As such, they are still running on an outdated operating system called “Christianity”, with the latest upgrade, “Constitution”, downloaded no less than a quarter millennium ago. This outdated operating system is, laughingly, making them believe that they have “rights” that the government cannot take away, such as the right to own unlimited number of modern weapons and stockpile unlimited amounts of ammunition. It also and equally laughably makes them believe that the government is not the highest power in their lives.

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Now, it is clear as day to any oligarch, let alone an Asian one, that a large populace with access to modern weaponry without government controls is insanity incarnate. It is equally clear that when the same populace tends to get its operating system upgrades not from the government, but rather in places like “churches”, the danger of societal collapse becomes both clear and present.

Now that the problem has been identified, what is the solution? Forced confiscation of firearms and total ban on organized religion enforced by an extensive GULAG-style system of prison camps is, perhaps, too culturally insensitive. We have to give Mr. Yang and those like him credit for understanding these cultural differences between Americans of European origin and the Chinese. At least initially, a more, shall we say, American solution must be attempted.

It now appears that after much analysis by the smartest, best educated people on Earth such a solution has been found. At the base of it lie the twin realizations that Americans, though lazy, like money and they like to spend their exceedingly large amounts of free time getting high rather than solving differential equations like any normal person would. These conclusions, easily verifiable by empirical observation, point to a truly American solution to the problem of recalcitrant individualism as expressed through allegiance to guns, the Bible, and the Constitution: give Americans free money with which they can legally buy drugs.

At this point, an informed reader may wonder: if the money is a small amount, say $100, it will not do the trick, but if it’s a significant amount, say $1,000 per month, this amounts to $20 billion per month (assuming an adult population of 200 million) or $240 billion per annum. Is that sustainable, an informed reader may ask, after all it is about one third of the entire defense budget.

Funny that you should ask this question, dear reader, because that clearly demonstrates that you are not nearly smart enough to work for the oligarchy. Who will determine the buying power of the $1,000 a month proffered by Mr. Yang? Since the American dollar is fiat currency, who is to say if $1,000 will cover your car payment and all your utility bills, or buy you lunch with the family at Long John Silver’s? The government will, that’s who. The government will determine the buying power of the ones and zeros that get sent to your “bank account” and nobody else. Oh and by the way, if you don’t voluntarily agree for your home to be searched for weapons, or refuse to comply with the order to turn in all your internal combustion engines: your cars, your boat, your ATV to the government, then, needless to say, your $1,000 a month will not be a “thing” in your life any more. After all, it’s quid pro quo. You get the quid, you got to give the quo, or else you are in breach of contract.

Of course, Columbia-educated juris doctor Yang will not do anything so stupid as to have the federal government give you the money directly, no strings attached. There will be a “private-public partnership”, a private corporation as far as the law is concerned, that would enter with you, the American citizen, into a perfectly legal and constitutional contract, one which will, of course, constitutionally strip you of all your constitutional rights.

And if you wake up, tear up the contract and dust off that shotgun you have hidden under the kids swing in the back of the house? There’s nothing to worry about, the Amazon drone that dropped off your laundry detergent just the other day has your exact GPS coordinates and it can carry a rocket launcher just as well as it can carry a box of Tide pods.