The struggle will be to find out how all the rest gets divided when controlling distribution of the right to live is no longer a bargaining position and discovering if we can still provide for everyone without servitude.
How many have you fed, housed and cared for this past month, and is it completely with no strings attached (no capital or labor of any kind expected from them --- only from yourself?)
Or if not, what is the blocker?
The blocker is that I don't have the time, expertise, bargaining power, or economies of scale to efficiently turn my money into social services. Governments are much better suited to that task, and some do so reasonably effectively. (e.g. universal health care, in countries that provide it.)
If you're not already doing this people will suggest talk is cheap and posturing has a negative value to society at large. Good luck with it!
I feel like this isn't going how you were expecting. I was supposed to be exposed as a hollow "progressive" who's free with other people's money but is secretly a grasping hypocrite. You shouldn't assume everyone is selfish just because you are.
You may not know how to fix it, but you can probably point out when you've got a compound fracture. If it isn't you with the broken bone, you're probably qualified to suggest that it probably is quite painful.
I've donated a fair sum already this month. I'm no more entitled to opine about the system than you are. It doesn't work like that.
Like you, I don't mind paying taxes. Hell, I look forward to seeing my tax bill. I also acknowledge I can pay more.
Err... I'm not kidding. I don't mind paying my taxes. I kind of like paying back to the system that enabled me to be where I am. On the other hand, I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values.
I grow weary of seeing functional equivalents to, "You're not solving the problem, your opinion is invalid." You don't have to contribute significantly to the solution to notice the problems. I feel that sort of thinking is just an excuse to maintain the status quo.
"I don't mind paying taxes." ... "I seriously wish they'd spend that money more wisely, or at least more in line with my values".
It's irrational to say, "I don't mind that money is being coerced from me by people who are squandering it and using it in ways that are not in line with my values."
I don't think that your position is actually conflicting, but perhaps misstated. That is to say, maybe what you don't mind is the concept of taxation as such. Yet you acknowledge that the actual people who, today, are charged with coercing money out of you are not spending it wisely or in line with your values. So of course you must mind. Otherwise why even mention that?
You're willing to pay more to solve a problem. Do it. No realy. Do it. The amount you're willing pay, pay that. It's that simple. Don't read more into it. Do it.
You're saying - "instead just give 5,000 dollars to a homeless person, done!"
I think the absurdity of the suggestion is apparent but just in case - there's the obvious issues of
1. Assuming OP is a software engineer with no knowledge of "the homeless plight" or the best economic mechanisms to drag someone out of homelessness, there's no way they could give the money away in a way that actually defeats the problem withouts significant research effort.
2. Donating to charity is a possibility, but is not as effective as "everyone paying 5% extra tax," which leads me to...
3. Rather than paying an extra 5% tax, the OP's most effective course of action would be to lobby the government and his/her local population to make efforts to pass legislation that enables the government to levy a tax on everyone, and then use that money to solve the homelessness problem.
So, just like the OP said, economies of scale, effectiveness.
I am mildly upset that everyone is somewhat attacking someone for wanting the right thing to happen but not just making it happen on their own. How absurd!
One person who wishes for governments to do more for the poor can't be held responsible for the entire homeless population in the nation. That's absurd.
No, actually there's not. Starvation is mostly linked to conflict zones nowadays. In normal conditions starvation is pretty much a problem from the past. Look at the WHO report on poverty and how things have clearly improved since, let's say the 70s or 80s.
I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free.
Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are partially there.
It would be a small shift in our mentalities: food is a necessary item to live, we must all contribute equally for it (as a society) and have easy access to it.
If anything I would be more worry about increasing the quantity of food wasted. Paying, even a little, can be necessary to signify that food is not infinite and growing from nothing, and thus, should not be wasted.
Definitely, we already heavily subsidize farmers, if the sole source buyer became the federal gov't we could cut out the middle men (Kroger, Walmart, the distribution warehouse chains, food staple speculators) and create a stable food supply for everyone.
Perhaps charge a piecemeal amount beyond a certain quantity, to reduce waste.
> the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization
Well, when you come in and break up the existing communes at gunpoint, you can't be surprised that their output drops to zero, combined with forcing the remaining peasants you haven't killed to form farming collectives.
Locally organized farming communes are quite productive, but you need buy-in from members, which takes time, effort, and proper economic incentives.
Classical Marxism is based in part on a hypothesis that a socialist revolution has a number of preconditions, one being an advanced capitalist economy (Russia of course did not meet that), and a second one being that as a consequence of that, a society with a large working class majority (Russia did not meet that either).
Lenin "worked around" this with a pamphlet published in the early 1890's where he argued that Russia was special: In Russia the large number of landless peasants would come to the support of the socialist revolution and make it possible for a socialist party to take control. Coupled with his idea of a "vanguard party" leading the masses, he believed this would allow Russia to basically "skip capitalism".
The big problem with that, of course, was that it never happened: In the elections for the Constituent Assembly arranged by the Provisional Government after the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks got a minority, with almost all their support in the big cities, while the peasants largely voted for more moderate parties - including the socialist SR/Left SR and Mensheviks. So the Bolsheviks went into their coup (the October "revolution" was a coup against the socialist-led Provisional Government; the Tsar had already been in house-arrest for months) in a situation where they must have known that the odds were most peasants would oppose their regime.
Collectivization then must be seen against a backdrop where the Bolsheviks not only had theoretical reasons to want to minimize the peasantry (trying to "leapfrog" capitalism), but also had very practical reasons to want to try to forcibly mold the peasantry into working class: they were afraid that leaving the peasants be would sow the foundations of further opposition.
Lenin relented a bit after the civil war, with New Economic Policy (which allowed limited market economy), but as soon as he died, Stalin pushed collectivization much harder and further, basically on the basis that while he couldn't eradicate farmers, he certainly could do whatever he could to try to turn farming into an industrial job.
So while they undoubtably also hoped to find ways of increasing productivity, it's worth realizing that a lot of decisions they took also had another purpose of basically trying to find a way of "farming without farmers" that was politically important especially for Stalin, and that made many possible concessions that might have mitigated disastrous outcomes completely politically unpalatable for the Bolsheviks because they especially early on feared for their power base. E.g. even the concession they did make under Lenin (NEP) were unpalatable enough for Stalin to reverse them.
It doesn't excuse what they did in any way, of course, but it goes so way towards explaining why they persisted in at times disastrous policies even after they'd clearly learned about the consequences - maintaining power remained more important for them than getting good outcomes.
Whether or not that's good thing, food is still scarce in the economic sense.
Yes exactly like healthcare in the US...