Ben Shapiro is a flaming liberal.

Ben Shapiro is a flaming liberal.

That might seem like a striking and ridiculous claim to many on the right wing of American politics, for whom the meaning of “liberalism” is restricted to the Democratic party. But let me explain what I mean.

A few weeks ago, Ben Shapiro interviewed the Democratic presidential candidate, Andrew Yang — the only Democratic candidate who has agreed to come on to Shapiro’s show. (As an aside, I have to admit that I like Andrew Yang a lot, even though I am by no means a Democrat.) Yang’s campaign revolves around a core proposal, which has been much in the news lately (in fact Medium has a whole category devoted to it), namely universal basic income. Yang calls his version of UBI by the name of “the Freedom Dividend,” which will give $1000 per month to every U.S. citizen. Of course, anyone could have predicted that Ben Shapiro’s reaction to this would be something like “socialism!!”; and that is indeed more or less what it was (although Shapiro’s conversation with Yang was admittedly more civil and level-headed than his weekday rants about socialism).

Yang’s idea behind the “Freedom Dividend” is that, given the coming onslaught of automated jobs and AI, which threatens to cause (and has already caused) massive unemployment in many industries, it is necessary that every man should be guaranteed to at least a…