The average American is incomparable wealthy compared to the average African, and you can on average save a life for only a few $thousand to one of Givewell's top recommended charities.
1: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
It's incredible how humans do this.
Doing something for some people and is better than the status quo but instead we lambast them for not doing even more.
Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10367855
Actually, it's an emergent phenomenon!
A poor person can spare little, a comfortably off person can spare more. If you really want to increase the charitable givings of a population, decreasing wealth disparity and making more people feel comfortable about their finances (ie. redistributing wealth), is a pragmatic way to do it.
The more I have, the more I give. The more the general population has, the more they will give.
Everyone ultimately has to focus on themselves in hard times. Want to increase charitable givings? Make it easy to be charitable.
If there is an overpopulation of deer, we don't put big buckets of feed in the forest to support them. But for the human animal, that is exactly what we do.
I know this is a taboo subject, but I think that we may be creating more misery by giving charity, then by doing nothing.
Using the absolute population size? If so, is America far more "overpopulated" compared to every other developed nation? If China were to split up into 20 sovereign nations, would it suddenly stop being overpopulated?
Or perhaps you're using population density? If so, Taiwan, South-Korea and Netherlands must be absolute cesspools to live in, since they all have population densities higher than India's.
Or more likely, you think that a country is overpopulated because it has a lot of poor people? If so, that sounds like a mighty fine circular reasoning. "Why is XYZ so poor? Because they are overpopulated." "What makes you say they are overpopulated? Because they are so poor."
But, what about the rest of it? Do you agree that people breed themselves to the natural edge of starvation? Would it be better to give them the means to have even more kids, perpetuating the cycle, or let them be?
Nicholas Kristof actually had a great article on this very topic, which will restore your faith in humanity: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/opinion/sunday/good-news-...
Charity is very much better than doing nothing.
they found a good thing to do. The fact that there are other good things they could have done doesn't make this less good.
There are a lot of things, like civil defense and firefighting and road building, that historically started working more reliably when they became government-run instead of depending on volunteers or private industry. What makes charity different?
This is why government is best left to handle things that cannot be adequately done without a central command, like keeping the military forces, or collecting taxes. It can also step in where private or public efforts fail, but don't expect it to be as efficient.
I think that's the big difference with things like defense at scale. You don't need war to be cheap, or to optimize dead enemies per dollar; you just need a guarantee that if someone attacks you anywhere and in any manner, there will always be some sort of armed force to defend you. Central command is nice but not necessary. Same with roads; central command is certainly unnecessary, but having reliable nationwide roads is better for a society than intermittent roads where they're profitable.
Do you believe that govermment-run charity will be less reliable than the status quo; that is, do you believe it will help less people? Why?
(I'm not asking about whether it's moral, just whether it works.)
The expense is not always monetary. While US clinics ask exorbitant amounts of money, clinics in certain countries with universal healthcare ask for large amounts of time. You need a surgery? Please wait 4-6 months. (E.g. https://expathealth.org/healthcare-news/global-patient-wait-...)
(Your moral system might also find that better, but morality is hard to argue.)
and? I never said capitalism didn't require any guardrails. Stop straw-manning other people.
> The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.
Why is Japan wealthy? South Korea? European countries? Is this the social justice theory of economics? There's not much evidence for that theory. It's pretty clear that capitalism (with appropriate guardrails and the rule of law) is wildly more successful than its alternatives. I think you're trying to argue that capitalism is beside the point and it's war and oppression that creates wealth. That's obviously nonsense.
Japan, South Korea, and side swathes of Europe are wealthy because of their positions as client states in the American Capitalist Imperium.
The US has spent trillions of dollars over the years trying to convince everyone that socialism can't work by making sure it doesn't work. It seems absolutely unscientific to ignore that.
In any case, I am not asking about the abolition of private property, just about government-mandated charity at scale. Let's say you get a marginal tax of 100% on salaries over $200K, and on wealth over $10M. That's more private property than most Americans will ever have in their life. Is tbat proven to fail? Where and how?
Except for Leninism and it's descendents, where has socialism of any kind been tried and failed?