I feel like this is dangerous thinking.
Very different approaches can be reasonably proposed to solve the same issues by people with very different perspectives on the world. People who don't support - or even directly oppose - the actions you believe should be taken don't necessarily not care about the same things that you care about.
Sure, but we have a system where individual's earning potential is pitted against the general welfare of communities. When the state needs to generate tax revenue for social programs and infrastructure corporations will fight it. As a country the US has been hollowed out by this conflict. The issue isn't _how_ these problems get solved, but _if_.
Libertarianism as an ideology is born out of this dichotomy, sold as small-government means big individual. In reality small government just means big corporations.
Higher taxes and government provided safety nets are less biased than charities. Why would I be proud of a country where people beg on Facebook for donations when their family gets cancer, and a significant portion of those go on to vote against things like universal healthcare, parental leave, minimum sick leave/vacation leave, etc.
They also incentivize problematic behavior. When there's no chance in hell that you won't get the money, you have little incentive to change your ways to become a productive member of society. Moral hazards are a thing.
Case in point: USA has a very well-developed bankruptcy system. Losing a business frequently means your business debts are absolved and you can start anew. One may think that such a system will encourage people to throw money at bad decisions: however, a bigger effect is that people are encouraged to cut the loss at a reasonable point and start a new business, because you can take calculated risks.
There are (or used to be) arcane economic systems based upon the reverse principle: if your business fails your life is ruined, so you have every incentive to stick to it until the bitter end, using up every resource, including your personal money, your family money, and your relatives' money. (South Korea used to be like that.) And guess what? It didn't bring more successful businesses, just more suffering.
They're not all positive though, they are incentivizing a part of the population to not contribute. I live around such people, and I have no doubt that they'd contribute if the alternative was going hungry and sleeping outside. But since the alternative is a 70sqm flat, a tv, xbox and smartphone, utilities paid for and food in the kitchen, they don't see a reason to contribute - it would just mean spending time doing things they don't like for more money. But as they already have their needs and most of their desires covered, that's not a good offer to them. They're perpetually relying on the safety net, and it tends to become intergenerational.
If you want to install a safety net, it's wise to address that issue.
Not all will, obviously. Some actually need the safety net (e.g. disabled people), others fall into it and then get up again. It's the ones who don't want to get up again that are the issue.
I'd rather have them return to contributing than pretending that, if we didn't have people who are lazy, we'd invent them.
Those carers are often entirely dependent on safety nets.
That is far from lazy! It's an exhausting thing to do.
Heck, for some even getting out to the shops is difficult, as how do you go out if you need to stay with your cared for person all the time.
Maybe you'd consider it solved if you count the benefits on which so many carers rely; certainly not without them.
Even then, I find it striking that benefits for carers where I live are lower than benefits for an unemployed person. As though a carer needs less to live on.
So asking for charity is bad, but forcing the government to use it's monopoly of force to take money from others for you is good?
Would you rather replace this with a system where children had to beg on gofundme for middle school tuition, where funding is implicitly decided by who has the best sob story and appeases the FB algorthim for that day.
Replace school with health care and his point is clear.
Absolutely. I will, with no hesitation, be fine with that trade.
A government, or more broadly, a society has no requirement to earn a profit and every incentive to keep its citizens healthy and happy so as to be positive members of society in order to perpetuate that society.
Remember that, in some areas of the country, fire protection is for-profit and if you didn't pay your fire company dues, your house will burn while you watch. Meanwhile, in the "socialist" areas with government-owned-and-operated fire departments, everyone's residence will receive at least some protection.
Two, if there's any body who would need to decide that, yes, the government would be a much more appropriate body than individuals - it is at least theoretically a representative of the whole population.
I don't think the entire point of society is to force people to participate in your choice program under threat of jailing
people who don't share your (presumably) anti-state views probably think this is basically what government is.
if you rephrased to something like "government action ought to be the last resort for solving the problems of a community", I could agree with you.
In my personal position, I want to "force" the government to "use it's [sic] monopoly of force" to accept a little more tax money from me in exchange for making sure that my fellow citizens, whether they're less fortunate or not, don't literally die because they don't have enough pieces of paper to pay for healthcare.
A majority of citizens, including those who regularly give to charity, are not equipped to properly allocate their charitable contributions. I'm not talking about making sure their money goes to the right problem area, I'm talking about making sure it's not funneled into a con man's pocket. Take a look at the financials on major charities and you'll quickly realize that philanthropy doesn't work all that well.
Side note - the government collects taxes, and must continue to do so in order to exist. If you're against taxes as a concept, you're against government existing altogether. If that's the case, your political ideology is effectively anarchism.
Side note on HN etiquette, to say the parent comment displays a "total lack of understanding of the USA" is an ad-hominem overstatement, ratchet back the language and turn up the civility.
On the other hand, the grandparent did make a statement which could be considered ad hominiem:
>"The US has always been a land for the rich to oppress the poor: the system encourages this. Those who care about the less fortunate are the minority."
* There's no guarantee that those charities are providing the right sort of support for the poor. For example, the thread you're replying to is about worse schooling for the poor, so are charities directly addressing that or just providing after school classes (less good), or even just food handouts to adults after it's already past the best time to educate them (far worse but unfortunately the most likely)?
* Are they even directed at the most poor at all? For example, it's common for the rich to donate to cancer research charities, which helps the rich more than it helps poor people who can't afford healthcare at all (but is still a good cause, don't get me wrong).
I always shudder when my rich coworkers donate money to their own children's private school, get the tax deduction, and also get a corporation gift match.
>"No healthy society should rely on private charitable as safety net for the less fortunates."
Why?
Charities are held to account by a very different constituency (the donors), who are in a much more powerful position.
I'm also not sure your assertion that "people will chose to transfer their wealth to those in their own tribe, and not to those outside of it" holds much water. I think donors often give to causes which affect people very different from themselves, and anyway, your state or nation is really just a different sort of tribe. Given some convincing evidence, I might believe that state-welfare programs are more equitable than private charities, but I have not seen such evidence.
"forcibly take money" I assume refers to levying taxes. I think you'll find that governments that don't levy taxes generally produce less liveable societies than those that do.
> "But the Saudi government—a highly autocratic regime—has historically resisted taxing its citizens for a reason: Taxes empower people to demand more from their government, and they can often be a trigger for democratization. “Taxation plays a profound role in the rise of democracy,” Sven Steinmo, a political-science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me."[0]
[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/sa...
My belief is that forcing somebody to do anything against their will is inherently immoral. Taxation is included in that. It's not that simple of course- it's all relative, and sometimes taxation can do enough good to outweigh that morality.
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to shutdown any government service. I can easly say, I don't have kids so I won't support schools. Or I don't like police/firefighters so I won't pay for them. I don't like parks so I won't pay. I drink water so I won't pay.
Any such society wouldn't survive. Either the next generation would simply be taken over by a competent government with an educated workforce and functioning social services. At some point you have to think beyond yourself ask what is needed to keep America alive.
1) in an economic downturn, one would expect charitable givings to decrease due to economic contraction. I think the evidence from the 2008 recession is somewhat mixed on this topic. Most governments, not reliant on personal donations, do not face the same sort of budget issues (which is another debate).
2) Charities have the ability to discriminate. They can choose how to allocate donations in ways that can include or exclude certain segments. This is in some respects true as well for government spending, but once again boils down to the allocation problem.
3) economies of scale. Larger organizations are often less redundant than a group of smaller organizations, reducing overhead.
> My belief is that forcing somebody to do anything against their will is inherently immoral. Taxation is included in that. It's not that simple of course- it's all relative, and sometimes taxation can do enough good to outweigh that morality.
Since you are not fully opposed to taxation, would you accept a taxation scheme for a government program if an independent and well researched study showed that government spend outperformed private programs by 2.5x, 10x, etc.? Or is it more that any issue that could be addressed via private charitable organizations should be off-limits for the government?
Basic education, housing, medical care, and food/water are areas that are so essential that having them be government run makes sense to me. I'd still prefer them to be as-local-as-practical, since I believe that accountability of government is increased the more local government is. I don't want the United Nations running my local elementary school as an extreme example.
I think that allowing for non-profit/charitable causes to exist and to have contributions to them be tax-deductible is still beneficial to society. I don't want the government deciding which churches are worthy of existing (that's problematic on multiple levels) and neither do I want to penalize someone who believes their church provides important enough community services to be worthy of support over someone else who believes that an art museum or the opera is worthy of support (whether that was via-government or via-donations).
There is no amount of government efficiency in supporting churches that would cause me to turn that over to the government.
There is no amount of private efficiency in providing for national defense that would cause me to turn the military over to private interests to run.
What about enforcing traffic laws, or forcing children to attend school?
They're both rhetorical arguments with a core truth, but if you attempt to take them out of rhetoric they're both incredibly silly.
This means the wealthier you are, the more say you have in appropriating what could be government money. If you make millions per year, you can potentially apportion more money than some citizens make in a decade. You effectively have more power in the government than many other citizens who should have the same capacity for change.
It's a form of plutocracy.
Why would my charitable giving give me power in the government?
> the more say you have in appropriating what could be government money.
Everything could be government money, my house could be a government house, my wife could be a government woman, etc.
Just because the government has the power to seize it doesn't mean they should or that it's theirs
I feel like I already outlined this, but it bears repeating. Taxation gives money to the government and the government decides how to spend it. If the government spends it poorly we can vote out those who use it improperly. You can't vote Jeff Bezos out of the country.
> Everything could be government money, my house could be a government house, my wife could be a government woman, etc.
Technically a percentage of you house is claimed by the government through property tax and your wife isn't property and I hope you know that.
Yes, that's exactly what it means, because, as you say it's "their" money. A pretty fundamental part of ownership is deciding what to do with something.
You really think government should be telling people how and where to spend their money?
Nope. And you are free to spend your money how you want. The point missed here is that when it's tax-deductible that money _would_ have been local/state/federal money.
The government already decided you need to return that money back to the community/country. If they give you the power to choose who gets it, they've given you the ability to appropriate government funds.
That isn't true, only a fraction of the money would have been taxed.
And that's exactly the point: We are incentivizing people to give 5 times as much money as taxes would have been.
If that money isn't allocated perfectly, well, there's 5 times as much of it, I think it'll be OK.
> The government ....
The government will never do a perfect job, this way we let people fill in the gaps.
> they've given you the ability to appropriate government funds.
You keep talking as if they deduct the full amount donated from taxes, this is simply not true.
Or is it that you think even the most charitable nation is not charitable enough? (hence acknowledging that charity doesn't appear to work).
[0] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-...
I agree that the USA is not charitable enough, but that doesn't mean charity "doesn't appear to work". The government is also bad at achieving its stated aims, but that doesn't mean we should stop depending on it, or stop trying to improve it.
I'm not trying to belittle your point, but is there a source that goes more in-depth on this topic?
"Joe Biden and his wife donated just $70,000 to charity in the two decades leading up to 2017, per their tax returns. But when their earnings skyrocketed in 2017, so did their giving. That year they handed more than $1 million, or about 9% of their income" (including $250K to their own foundations) (still pretty low since he and his surviving children got stinking rich after the Vice Presidency and is quite old)
-Forbes
There’s nothing in contradiction with the parent’s sentiment and this giving.
More importantly, why aren't we collectively falling all over ourselves to help those people?
Consider how many tiny, regional/branch charities/NGOs they are in your city alone, and then consider all the overhead of running a small business. Now multiply the two numbers together.
Circumstances are unique in most cities, dealing with on location is usually more efficient than a one-size-fits-all approach that cannot consider local reality (or it would lose any and all efficiency).
If you contrast the effectiveness of the food stamp program, or school lunches, or medicaid to literally any charity in the US, you will find that they blows them out of the water, in terms of impact per dollar.
You are vastly underestimating the impact of economies of scale. The overhead of food stamps, for instance is 0.7%. You won't find a single small charity that operates that efficiently.
I understand the hope in UBI in that regard, it would make a lot simpler by giving people money and then praying that they'll use it wisely.
Everyone needs a roof over their heads, food, and occasional access to medical care. When they can't afford one of those things, it doesn't take long for them to end up on the street.
The highest-ROI way to deal with homelessness is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Without food stamps, section 8, unemployment benefits, and Medicaid, there would be an explosion of homelessness, regardless of local circumstances.
The homeless population wasn't born on the street. Most of it ended up there, because of a medical condition that was left untreated (Addiction is a medical condition), or because they couldn't afford making last month's rent.
You'd be far better off throwing resources behind healthcare, or SNAP, or section 8, or at-risk-youth-programs, compared to funding your local charity that has 4 employees and a director [1] that administers 9 temporary-shelter beds. [2]
[1] I wish I was kidding about this, but that's how a lot of small charities operate.
[2] That won't take you, if you have an addiction problem.
This is all only an issue because technology is exploding right now and our government is not designed for the rapid changes in legislation necessary to keep up. Improved communication tools have enabled outsourcing and automation that now allows 1 person to do what was formerly 400 peoples' jobs. Data privacy has become a very sudden public concern when 4 years ago it was revealed people could use that data to swing an election. Professional media outlets are now suddenly competing with average-joes-angry-blog for views and most have needed to switch to low quality/high outrage just to survive.
You end up in a situation where the same system that would have worked 50 years ago suddenly doesn't work now. But the current wealth disparity is not irreversible.
On the contrary, you can vote to change your government, but the corporations get to do what they want with 0 accountability. If they have a pseudo-monopoly (like several large tech companies do today), you can "choose" to use them or miss out on basic life services.
The fact that these monopolies can exist is a failure of the government.
Some, like telecom companies, exist because they have ownership over a scarce resource (spectrum). I might argue that because of that scarcity, internet should be a function provided by the government and not private companies at all.
Others, like smartphone OS's (iOS vs Android), exist because they are years ahead of any competition, and then entrench themselves by using custom parts and protocols. In an ideal world, there would be an OS-agnostic language for developing mobile apps, just as web pages are (mostly) browser-agnostic. Likewise, as manufacturing parts gets cheaper hopefully it becomes easier for tech enthusiasts to build their own phones with an open source OS. The government should have a role to facilitate this outcome.
But yes, monopolies leave us helpless
Wholeheartedly agree with this! But I think it's not just the US. Any states that emphasizes and pushes capitalism and it's values are going the same way. Seems like the only states where inequality isn't spiraling out of control are countries that are not strictly aiming for one system, but taking the best out of many, a balanced diet of systems.
Many developed countries by your definition are 'socialist', yet fare far better than the US.
I was making fun of the people that claim any attempt at fixing the system is socialism.
A day of reckoning is only wishful thinking. The Matthew effect is here to stay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
*I am always perplexed by how Americans feel so much pride over this