I'm just amazed at the level of negativity in this thread and so many grey comments. To look at something objectively and appreciate for what it is, is very important.
Those kinds of services shouldn't depend on the generosity of the rich and powerful: those services should be provided because they are social rights. Just like healthcare and education.
Of course I am happy that some homeless in Seattle will have a nice roof over their head thanks to Amazon's generosity, but I would be even happier if Amazon would start paying its fair share taxes across Europe, instead of eluding taxation thanks to financial tricks.
That's not negativity: that's the elephant in the room. We should be aware between a nice action and a systemic problem, or between good advertisement and reality.
Ok, but they do, so this is a good thing. It's like you're saying that the signing of a peace treaty is a bad thing because we shouldn't have wars in the first place.
It's nice that a handful of people are being helped, but they are utterly dwarved by the amounts of people in the same situation who won't ever receive help, not because it's impossible (other countries do it fine) but because the country refuses to recognize the needs of all of its citizens.
Additionally I believe organizations are better when they serve a prime directive.
I always shake my head in disgust when I see companies like Chick-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby trying to promote religion, or the myriad of Silicon Valley companies trying to promote some progressive social agenda, or even fireman in uniform out on the side of the road collecting money for something.
It's not that I disagree with helping people but I think it's best done if fireman are putting out fires and Amazon is delivering goods and Chick-Fil-A is making sandwiches to the best of their ability and at the best price point rather than posturing about Jesus.
The organizations for helping the helpless should be charities, churches, and since we can't depend on these (and many have ulterior motives), indeed mostly government itself.
We don't need puff PR moves. We need efficiency. And dependable results that scale to society at large.
They are out there likely collecting money for some essential piece of equipment like a new fire truck or protective gear for their members.
Your cynicism is nearly, but not quite, complete. Government has ulterior motives too. Most simply of the "buying votes" form; anyone dependent on the government isn't going to vote for less of it. But there are more subtle forms of it too.
There is almost nobody who is altruistic, but can pass a "no other motives except pure altruism" test. If you think you can name someone, I'm sure someone else will be sure to pop up and explain their ignoble motives.
I probably am a cynic (or a realist as I prefer to consider) but it's less the ulterior motive of churches and charities and more the lack of dependability and ability to scale.
I see it to be a function of government to care for the disabled or less fortunate if for no other reason than to avoid the associated social problems. Others might not agree. Government traditionally doesn't do the most efficient job at things, and this one they are doing particularly poorly at, but to be fair it is a hard problem with lots of factors.
If you think about government delivered services as simply a provider operating in a market for that service, you'll find a startling large proportion of them are natural monopoly markets, or markets that produce public goods (non-rivalrous and non-excludable e.g. national defence). Would a private monopolist be more efficient in these situations, simply because they are not 'the government'?
Since this view requires looking at profit for deciding whether something should exist or be done, you end up with things like the county north of me: no more hospital. It's not profitable there, they're down to an urgent care clinic and local doctors, mostly GPs. But for anything major, it requires transportation to a facility that's 45+ minutes away on a good day. So for emergency situations you're possibly totally fucked and will have more serious consequences due to the delays (fatalities, amputations due to delays, etc.). For less immediate problems you still have many increases in local economic problems as the infirmed have to travel much further for specialized care. I needed PT, fine, it's 10 minutes from my office. In that county, it's the next county over. You need most of a day off for a 1 hour PT session now. Or you skip the PT session and are less effective and more prone to injury and illness as a result.
"The government", as derided as it may be by some people, largely provides those services which are not profitable generally (defense, police) or not profitable locally (hospitals) or not profitable immediately (education). Those are all financial sinks, but necessary for the overall good of the nation. So the government provides them either directly (public schools) or indirectly (healthcare through subsidies and giving financial incentives to doctors to go to rural areas).
When those services do become profitable, it's generally by abuse of authority or position. The defense industry by milking the taxpayers for all we're worth. Healthcare by hiding the true costs of things and making it hard to discover. Education with for-profit universities (again, by milking the taxpayers, this one by tricking people into getting federal loans for an expensive sub-par degree).
As a shareholder, I don't expect or want Amazon to take ownership of community help. Their work is admirable but ultimately limited in scope and efficiency. Adding in overhead for accounting, tax enforcement, these issues would received more money and higher ROI if we funded them through higher taxes.
Communities are still perfectly capable of taking care of their own. Smaller towns throughout the US do this but you don't see those from the larger cities and/or coasts doing this. I live in Eastern WA/Western ID, and the community is still very much involved in these types of projects without the government stepping.
I'm as cynical as about corporations as the next guy , but what makes you so rosy eyed about the government? Is it because governments invade foreign countries and subjugate their people? That they incarcerate millions of their own people for abusing the wrong kind of drug? That they surveil all of our communications?
For sure private philanthropy is not perfect, but neither are government programs.
Profit's tied to government (in the US especially), but there's at least a single degree of separation (maybe less so recently). Our democracy still has the theoretical power to change it.
When it's corporate it's entirely inflexible, directly tied to profit (and the economy), and there's little to no requirement for transparency. It's all the downsides of government, with an included layer of obscurity... and also some more downsides.
I think our current administration makes this pretty clear. If left to corporate interests major assets like Planned Parenthood, National Parks, and The National Endowment for the Arts would likely not exist at all (that's just the tip of the iceberg).
Corporate funded initiatives can be completely ejected on a whim when profits are down. With the federal government you can't just remove these things without some level of checks & balances...
Furthermore, it could be argued that your examples actually demonstrate the effectiveness of government programs... I oppose surveillance and warfare, but citizens keep voting those politicians into office, and those programs are achieving their results with astoundingly undesirable effectiveness.
I suspect our domestic problems would be resolved overnight if they had similar funding levels.
Trusting a wealthy company or individual to keep giving a hand-out? Nope, no interest in begging for scraps. I prefer the self-determination of a government by the people, for the people, etc.
With all the arcane rules and policies of any government, you could probably make a case that corporations are more representative than a corrupted political process.
If corporations actually represented all the stakeholders, salaries would be higher, retirement plans would be better, products would be designed to last longer, and golden parachutes wouldn't exist or be as big. Right now, CxO's get an outsized representation compared to their actual role within the organization; same for members of corporate boards.
It also leads to extreme abuses. In feudal times support was often available in exchange for a night with your wife, daughter, or child.
These services are already segregated by race, religion, culture, and location - yes, even in Western European countries - both explicitly and implicitly.
In fact, pretending that these problems don't exist and that the government effectively supports and protects all citizens equally is exactly how systemic racism, sexism, and bigotry persist and propagate.
Yeah, there were abuses. Seems more then than there are now. Western Ethics have evolved and are now reflected in ALL of our institutions in some capacity or another. It's not your government protecting you from evil corporations. It's people. Always people who believe things. Change those beliefs and you change everything else.
If you trust a self-selected random sampling of "people," I suggest that you participate in a jury trial... or just read some YouTube comments.
Government assistance is subject to the rule of law. The rules are public, relatively objective, and codified. The rule of law as implemented by people is by no means perfect, but it's vastly superior to the rule of random emotionally-driven whim.
Governments are subject to the whims of the people as the modern US continues to show. It doesn't matter what fancy rules you have written in a dusty drawer, when people want something to happen, it happens. Though as an aggregate of what everyone involved wanted to happen. Our society follows those rules today largely because we were taught and learned to believe in them. As those rules fail, people will learn and believe in other things.
The math doesn't pencil out. Global population is approximately 7.4 billion.[1] One percent of 7.4 billion is 74 million. In cannot be the case that every member of the global one percent is American. But there are more than 70 million Americans that made money income of more than $47,000 in 2015.[2]
[1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/?intcmp=w_200x402
[2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
Scrolling through all their infographics, I finally get to this: "For the income track, we've used the most recent (2008) statistics from the World Bank, based on household surveys. Here we rank you against the entire world population at the time of the surveys, estimated at 6.69 billion people."
I dug into the data behind your claim, briefly, and I think I ended at a self-reported survey. So, that data is probably wrong.
But we also live in a rich nation, and things cost more. If you're a family living in New York, $32k a year isn't going to leave you with a lot of spare cash to send to families in need overseas.
This meme needs to die. You may be in the top 1% globally, but cost of living is based on your country and state/city. Making $32,400 a year as a household puts one not much higher than poverty level in America.
That could be because they aren't trying to help -- or it could be because of the difference between "I haven't heard of ..." and "I know they aren't". What reason do you have to think that it's the former?
Specifically, do you know whether the people you're talking to give money to charities that try to help poor people? (Whether in the US or abroad in poorer places where one can do more good per dollar.)
In any case, I think your criticism is logically unsound. That is, you can't get from "X doesn't spend his own money trying to change Y" to "X is insincere when saying Y should be changed", and still less to "Y should not in fact be changed".
Let's take a concrete example. X has an income of $100k/year and says that incomes at that level should be taxed an extra $1k/year in order to help the poorest people in society. X could find a poor person and give them $1k/year, but doesn't. Does this show that X doesn't really mean what he says?
Nope. Let me sketch for you a position X could (somewhat plausibly) hold. X is a kinda-utilitarian. He wants to maximize overall well-being, except that he cares (let's say) 100x more about his own well-being than any other person's. Of course there's more to well-being than money, but let's say that (in X's opinion) income makes a contribution to well-being that's proportional to log(annual_income+$5k) -- I remark that this sort of dependence of utility on money is very widely used, and isn't some sort of unnatural cherry-picked thing chosen to get the results I want. And let's suppose that X is in the US, that the US's labour force is 150M people, of whom 20% are at or above that $100k/year threshold and 10% are at or below let's say $12k/year. X's proposal is to take $1k/year from each of the 30M comfortably-off people and give $2k/year to each of the 15M poor people.
So, how do the utility calculations stack up? For the "global" change: 30M people go from log(105k) to log(104k) and 15M people from log(17k) to log(19k). (Actually, some of the 30M will be on higher incomes and lose less utility, and some of the 15M will be on lower incomes and gain more utility.) So each of the comfortable people loses 0.0096 units of utility and each of the poor people gains 0.111 units. Since 0.111 is much more than twice 0.0096, this is a big win overall. Of course we also need to count X's loss 100x more -- but that's completely swamped by the millions of other people affected.
But for the "personal" change where X alone makes the sacrifice: he goes from log(105k) to log(104k), losing 0.0096 units ... but remember that he counts himself 100x more, so he actually loses 0.96 units. That's much more than the 0.057 units his $1k could provide to a poor person.(Not 0.111 -- remember that the plan was to redistribute two lots of $1k/year to each poor person, but there's only one X.)
A society all of whose comfortably-off people think as X does would choose to make that change, making the poor richer and the rich poorer for an overall benefit; all of them would agree with this despite caring 100x more about themselves than about each other person, because there are so many other people. But a single X would not choose to make the donation on his own. No inconsistency or insincerity required.
(Well, maybe there's a little inconsistency, to the following extent: someone whose values are exactly as I described would in fact support more redistribution than the proposal above. Note that this goes in exactly the wrong direction to help your argument.)
The numbers above are not cherry-picked for anything other than plausibility and simplicity of calculation, and in particular I picked them all before doing any actual utility calculations. Most people are not exactly "weighted utilitarians" like X, but I think X's weighted utilitarianism is a reasonable -- though of course imperfect -- approximation to many people's moral values. Logarithmic dependence of utility on money is a very standard assumption, with a pedigree going back to the 18th century and widespread usage continuing to the present day.
FWIW, local churches of Seattle had a rotation going to host Mary's Place. It was sort of a hassle; you needed people who volunteered for the night to monitor the situation, some food and drink served for dinner & breakfast (if I remember correctly). Only a few people volunteered and burnout was high.
I too am really uncomfortable with a local duke offering some of his property to help, knowing that if it becomes troublesome, he'll just pull out.
US homelessness is extremely difficult to deal with; in large part of the principle of federated states being semi-independant. In order to manage this at an acceptable level, it becomes a purely national coordinated effort. Otherwise one city/state or the other starts to become the place homeless are routed to by the local governments who don't have resources or interest in helping them. Of course, part of the subtext is that the US deinstitutionalized the mentally ill in the late 70s (for several reasons, including the gross violations of human rights and a general distrust in institutions). So on the street you have drug addicts, runaways, the mentally ill, criminals, people who had too little money to pay rent, travellers (rainbow folk and the like), #vanlifers, and people who broke up with their partner. It's an unpleasant combination that the US is unable to solve without significant multiparty negotiation or federal override.
See https://www.womensaid.org.uk/the-survivors-handbook/money-is... and other pages in the section.
Nonetheless, Amazon lives in the world as it is and it's doing what it can do. The space is an unalloyed good for those people and Amazon deserves a ton of credit.
1) No business pays any tax, ever. They are collectors of tax only. The embed their taxes and fees in the products and services they sell which means the consumer is the payer. So at most they are guilty of collecting and not turning over taxes. The tricks you bemoan exist because politicians and countries of the EU can still bargain to better support their own people and do so.
2) Considering the level of taxation in Europe, if you think that services are inadequate you need to ask your officials just what have they been spending it on? How are few hundred million or another billion really go to fix it without spending discipline.
As for philanthropy, welcome to the US. It has always been a social quirk of the US for people and companies to step in. Its what they do. Its a social agreement built on history. It should be celebrated, not demonized.
This is only true in some cases, but what actually determines whether the business pays the taxes out of profits or passes it along to consumers are the elasticity of demand and elasticity of supply. In an extreme example, think of a monopoly with large profit margins facing extremely elastic demand; it will have no choice but to pay the bulk of the tax out of profits. I didn't review these links carefully, but it looks like you can learn more at [0], [1], and [2] if you're interested.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
[2] https://www.boundless.com/economics/textbooks/boundless-econ...
That's hardly unique to the US. Many (most?) of the world's religions have a similar call to action, to give to people in need. Though some are more inclusive (anyone in need) and others more exclusive (members of the religious community).
And similarly no consumers pay any tax ever. They are collectors of tax only. They embed their "fees" in the salaries they demand from their employers.
Or more accurately, both consumers and businesses are responsible for paying taxes as part of the responsibilities of benefiting from a functioning society. One that provides a structure of law, an educated populace, common infrastructure and a safety net.
All sides are responsible for contributing to society - business just have consolidated more power. Sufficient enough to escape the responsibilities of paying taxes.
"At most"? Do you believe that collecting others' taxes and keeping them for your own profit is somehow better than tax dodging?
I agree with Nick - Nick Hanauer www politico com magazine story 2014 06 the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 .
The hero worship and the billionaire worship has to stop. And above all Amazon does not create anything of value. They are middle men. And whatever they touch they destroy. Small businesses. POOF, predatory pricing. Walmart, done (Amazon is so bad it makes walmart look like a good guy that hires people in real stores). Sears, gone. And with compute? sure, its cheap, its utility, and margins on hardware, near zero. But if you instantiate an amazon instance for 1 second, oh, you are getting that bill even if the IOPs are trash and it takes 20 minutes to boot.
Make no mistake Bezos is not a "good guy" he is a maniac and a megalomaniac. When he finally manages to get your job (or you manage to finagle a high stress job at Scamazon) youll sing to a different tune.
This is certainly a Good Thing, but I don't blame people for knee-jerk skepticism.