Generally speaking Republicans tilt fiscally and socially conservative. I'd be fascinated (no sarcasm) to hear an argument on how party platform and most members are social liberals.
To put another way, if you averaged out the beliefs of all who consider themselves Republicans, Trump himself doesn't believe most of it, certainly not dogmatically.
I agree that the dynamics you describe account for some of the reason Trump's base is primed to latch onto him.
But as far as Trump himself goes, he's not really a Republican. He is solely concerned with receiving praise and feeling tough. There is no master plan; that is really all there is to it.
This decision has zilch to do with whether it's good environmental policy or will create jobs. All it has to do with is Trump's desire to feel like Alpha Man of Action when he goes to some rally/playdate in Iowa and can present a reason for everyone to tell him how incredible he is. That is the alpha and omega of policy making in this administration.
UBI still will have some short term profiteering effects. A slum lord who knows his tenants are uniformly $1K/mo richer is going to raise the rent short term. You seem to be assuming everyone is automatically acting in their long term best interest. "Oh neat, I'm going to raise the rent $500 and plow it into new apartments and renovations so five years from now I'm still competitive!" Vs. "I'm going to raise it $500 and buy a BMW!" I just don't see it not happening. I agree that long term it will hash out.
You are basically saying that what happens in the short term is not relevant, but as taxpayers, a lot of people will be upset by profiteering in the manner I described, even if it is only for 1-3 years.
Or from another angle- what will prevent an ever increasing amount of tuition such as happened with the higher education system? "We need to raise the voucher to $10,000 now…"
It feels ambitious to suppose an equilibrium state for schooling to be met within a year. I'd buy two or three.
Is it the case that existing private schools have much excess capacity? Frequently the argument for private schools is smaller class sizes; a rapid influx of new students without new, excellent teachers defeats the purpose. Presumably new classrooms would need to be constructed and so on.
If you receive a $5,000 voucher and your private school jacks up tuition by let's say $1,000, it is unlikely many parents are going to disrupt their routines and children's routines to reclaim that amount, especially since they are feeling relief from a net $4K tuition break. Tuition has effectively decreased, so why rock the boat?
Long term this may indeed happen but in the short term, it seems unlikely. Like with school vouchers, if I ran a private for-profit school and knew my students suddenly had an extra $X,000 to spend on tuition, my short term move would understandably be to raise tuition at least some percentage of that amount. If the market responds in a couple of years by forcing me to dial it back, so be it, but in the meantime I've made more money without having to provide more services.
Don't forget that as CEO, likely it is true that if he had a question about direction or implementation, a hundred engineers would almost immediately respond to him. This 100 hours' investment isn't like you think of some lone hacker poking around SO; he's gluing something together with instant handholding available.
It is totally fine to take action against a business; that the business is comprised of people who have no direct input into the actions of the entity and may face consequences of the actions against it should not be an important consideration of where you choose to spend your money.
A counterexample would be a situation where someone went and figured out that most of Nestle's employees were supporting Trump and then boycotted the business as a way to pressure those employees into altering their positions. That is much closer to being morally objectionable.
Outside of that, Altman _has_ criticized Thiel's views, directly. The disagreement seems to be about what to do afterwards. He is simply not willing to cut him off for this disagreement. If this way of thinking was a social norm, you would eliminate "anti-PC" griping which is important to a good chunk of Trump supporters, and you would likely see positive social change happen more rapidly (e.g. if this was the norm 50 years ago you might have seen more movement on gay marriage, etc. if people could pipe up without fear of being fired (or "boycotted")).
Boycotts are designed to force a _business_ to change behavior.
If we extend this into the realm of the individual and political speech, it is a totally different animal with clear dangers for freedom of expression.
I am not myself sure if I would consider it a moral failing to "boycott" an individual as a pressure tactic in these circumstances (or more like misguided social engineering) but it is definitely laudable to take a more nuanced view as Altman and YC have done.
Fair enough re: employment, but if we shift "employed by" to "do business with" it's still the same discussion.
A theme going on here is a binary state regarding how we should treat individuals and consider their positions. This idea of "endorsing" Thiel means you are supporting all of his political views and not just his business views. That if one supports Trump one is all-in on all of his positions.
For example, many of Trump's supporters are identifying with his economic message. They may find his immigration stance to be distasteful but the overriding concern is the economy, so they are willing to suck it up. Trump's bloc isn't a monolithic group with shared priorities.
Altman's position on this is exactly correct- expressing his disagreement with Thiel but with the maturity to quash the urge to run away from or "punish" Thiel. We would be better off as a society if we all adopted this mindset.
Almost nobody will agree with the idea that in an ideal world built upon the "marketplace of ideas" that someone should be constrained from expressing political opinions for fear of losing their employment.
In fact this being so is a primary driver of Trump's anti-PC appeal.
Regarding Stern, CNN had as "BREAKING NEWS!@!" that Trump told Stern it was OK to call Ivanka a piece of ass. Possibly CNN was lying about presenting this as something they just discovered; is that what you are claiming?
Yes, I am suggesting that every show would have stuck someone (more likely, a team) on reviewing their material (prioritizing the outtake material, if anything) on Trump as soon as it turned out he was a big deal. I am not clear as to why you think this would not have occurred; why Occam's razor supports that viewpoint. The bus tape would have been a huge story at any time and would not have required building off interest in other stories to investigate (e.g. "Gee whiz, we should look at the archival footage and see what we have! Why didn't we think of this before!")
I find it preposterous that it took this long to hear that Trump bus tape as well as the Stern recordings. If you were connected to either of these shows, wouldn't the first thing you did when Trump started to become a story was go looking through the material you had on him? It's simply not credible that they "just found" the bus tape. Was it lost behind a toilet somewhere? That they had this for a while now and were saving it for maximum impact is far more likely than it being only now discovered.
There's nothing wrong with any of that, but you can't complain if your audience follows your lead. Not that Musk was complaining (to the best of my knowledge) but others on his behalf.
If I chair a board meeting wearing a clown nose, I can't complain when the members pull out squirt guns.