Sometimes these issues depend on the prism through which one views them. What is the “true value” of the labor of a starting pitcher? What was it before Drysdale and Koufax formed a union? What was it after? What was it after Marvin Miller formed a players’ association? What was it after an arbitrator threw out the reserve clause? MLB cannot possibly have reflected the true value of players’ labor throughout the industry’s existence. It has, however, reflected their bargaining power or lack thereof.

Value is not inherent. Value is the resolution of bargaining power vectors. Bargaining power is an existential fact, which may or may not be altered by legislative action. In other words, economic bargaining power is the product of political bargaining power, which is to say that they are the same thing. Thus, if workers can negotiate a fifteen dollar national minimum wage in Congress, then that is what labor is worth, unless and until the supply of goods and services is impaired by the shortage of labor. (Local minimum wages are a wholly different thing as people often have the option of moving nearby. That’s why Hawaii can do things Philadelphia can’t.)

Likewise, we should take the “dividend” part of Yang’s UBI as more than rhetoric. The USA is the world’s only superpower, an enormous, continental economic juggernaut with a mature legal system featuring only modestly corrupt administration by global standards. Our people want to buy stuff, and we have the distributive infrastructure to get stuff from the port of entry to the buyer’s garage, kitchen, bedroom or den. That means credit, warranties, roads, truckers, and every link in the physical and institutional chain that supports commerce. We, the people of the United States of America, built that machinery, and we, the people deserve something for our efforts.

In short, we deserve a dividend. We already get a dividend in the form of lower interest rates arising from our trade deficit. Our trading partners accept our money in payment and invest it mostly in our securities. The trade deficit supports the fiscal deficit, and the fiscal deficit absorbs the trade deficit. That’s economic rent for doing business here. Our idiot President doesn’t realize the tariffs simply cannibalize that rent by reducing the attractiveness of selling here, reducing demand for our securities, raising interest rates. That doesn’t make them wrong tactically, but it does make them wrong as revenue-raisers, which the aforementioned idiot President does not know, because, well, he’s an idiot President.

The problem with the “rent” we receive from our trading partners is that it is not equitably distributed. The Freedom Dividend distributes it more equitably by giving it to those who don’t save on interest payments. Maybe interest rates will rise a bit if a larger deficit is needed to fund it, maybe not, as the Freedom Dividend is taxable to recipients and has a multiplier that produces taxable income. Mr. Yang proposes a value-added tax, which may be an idea whose time has come, but it’s not clear yet that just printing the money won’t work.

Either way, the UBI should not be seen as an alternative to anything else, except to the extent that it ameliorates the hardship on which those things might be based. It is earned income, earned and/or bequeathed by generations of Americans whose collective citizenship has resulted in our national ability to demand rent for dealing here. Which is why he is wrong to argue against the minimum wage. The minimum wage is not a dividend; it’s a wage, negotiated by workers for their work. If he wants to live by the “dividend” label, as he should, then he has no reason to claim that a worker’s wages should be reduced on account of dividends on any company stock he may own.

Here’s a poem I like, not so much for its soppy sentiment as for its fractal conceit:

He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In! (Edward Markham)

The same can be said of wages. Where is the circle around the bargaining unit? Is it around the individual, the two star pitchers, the company, the trade, the industry, or the workforce? It is where the negotiators negotiate it to be. The minimum wage is a negotiated wage. If it is too high, it will fall; if not, then not. But there is nothing “inherently” inaccurate about it.