And there were oh so many ways

For her to spend her days

She could clean the house for hours

Or rearrange the flowers

Or run naked through the shady street

Screaming all the way

 — “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” Marianne Faithfull, 1979

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?”