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The greatest teacher I ever had gave me some good advice before I went to college.

“When you start college, all of your peers are roughly worth nine dollars per hour,” he told my class. “Do everything you can to increase that value in those four years, and don’t hate your classmates who increased their economic value more than you did.”

He made clear to remind us that our economic value had zero correlation with our human value. To judge people with fewer marketable skills, he said, would be to go down “jerk road.” This was my rough introduction to understanding the evils of utilitarian ethics.

Somewhere along the line, the Democratic Party has had a divorce between Kantian liberals, who understand that a social safety net ought to exist for those lacking the skills or opportunities to finance themselves, and utilitarian leftists, who view market forces themselves as fundamentally evil. No one exemplifies this break more than socialist superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

I discussed the economic forces (mis)guiding this tweet earlier this week, but it’s worth considering the ethical fallacy here. Ocasio-Cortez insinuates here that the economic value of human labor ought to be tied not to market equilibrium but human value. A suboptimal airport croissant may be $7. An hour of unskilled labor may be worth $11.80 in New York, though LaGuardia is increasing its own minimum wage to $19. But the value of the human life itself has nothing to do with its economic potential or its earning power. It’s priceless.

I’ve been struggling to ascertain why Andrew Yang is so interesting. The self-described “Asian guy who likes math” provides plenty of policy wonkishness of which the 2020 race is sorely in need, but “candidate who provides actual details” or “caring about funding as much as costs” isn’t revolutionary. It took Yang’s latest interview with Wired for me to understand what fundamental truth Yang has highlighted.

When asked about the common platitude that people losing manufacturing jobs can simply learn to code, Yang responded:

To be clear, this is a liberal argument, not a conservative one. Yang’s specifically setting up the case for a $1,000 opt-in universal basic income which he dubs the “freedom dividend.” He argues that it will help those financially struggling to overcome the cognitive biases of fiscal instability and provide a baseline social safety net so that people have more flexibility in pursuing various careers.

But this is also a liberal argument, not a utilitarian one, that inadvertently diagnoses an ill that’s overtaken the insurgent wing of the Democratic Party. Two things can be true at once: People should feel obligated to increase their economic value insofar as they can sustain their own lives, and people also have an intrinsic human value that cannot be measured in dollars. Yang is effectively paving a potential neoliberal future for the Democratic Party — one which can call for increased government spending without engaging in goofy AOC economics that vilifies the free market, which has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty worldwide so far just this century, and billions more in the 20th Century, and which is the single most efficient form of allocating goods and services.

American socialists like to point to Scandinavian countries to justify increasing central planning. But Scandinavian countries rely on the free market to fund their welfare safety nets. They do not employ fundamentally centralized socialist systems with market forces on the fringes. As Veronique de Rugy pointed out late last March, the future that Ocasio-Cortez looks little like the increasingly deregulated Denmark and Sweden, and it bears little resemblance to the Norwegian petro-state either.

Ocasio-Cortez ought to listen to Yang. Yes, liberals believe in economic safety nets, but a UBI can provide it without harming the entire economy the way a $15 federal minimum wage would, especially in those states and regions with lower costs of living.

In other words, it’s a mistake for Democrats to go down “the jerk road,” and instead understand that economic value has a cap, but human value is infinite.