It’s also profoundly inefficient and stupid. Credit card companies can approve you in 15 seconds, there is no reason the government couldn’t
Additionally, most of the poverty programs I am familiar with are not a subjective decision process. You either meet the requirements or you don't. If you don't, they tell you why and you either agree or you have to appeal and get whatever incorrect information they have on file corrected.
[1] https://edd.ca.gov/siteassets/files/unemployment/pdf/fraud-i...
Lumping all social programs together and pointing out the one with the biggest fraud issue is disengenious —- e.g. the SSA reports that our disability programs have a fraud rate of less than 1%.
Seems a tad steep.
However, the systems actually are gatekeeping on the basis of desert or merit. That's a more debatable virtue but the only viable alternative is to instead push out aid through local, flexible, discretionary face-to-face interactions between people who know one another well...... like when you helped a personal friend......
That's because that bureaucracy isn't there to serve its clients. Its there to serve itself. Those are politically popular jobs that flourish on backs of the underserved and impoverished. There's no incentive to reduce the friction when for the most part poverty is seen as a personal moral failing. It's not the system. It's "them". And the system perpetuates itself and that belief.
They are not money spent to help anyone, they are money spend to prevent access to existing programs.
Take the intensive case management for instance. If you are severely disabled and in need of assistance, the state will pay for a case manager to help you with life.
Case managers are paid $7 an hour when alone, $14 with a client. When they are with a client, they are instructed to do mostly paperwork. The goal here is to not actually help people, but to fill out paperwork in proximity to them to collect state funds, while paying social workers peanuts without benefits. So the case manager helping the impoverished is herself, financially insecure.
So where is all the money going?
A company manages the case managers, and they pocket the bulk of state funds. The management, board, and directors all live in very large houses and drive very expensive cars. Case managers drive 2002 Honda Accords without AC or a radio. Clients live in squalor, just happy to have someone doing their paperwork nearby. This is the American caste system.
So I think you can see, even when we fund social services, the money still ends up in the hands of the wealthy. It’s just what capitalism is designed to do.
Capitalism is simply allowing private citizens to own, in part or full, the means of production such as farms and businesses. I'm not sure that capitalism is responsible for a decision about dispersing government money to create terrible jobs resulting in mismanagement and horrible customer service.
> money still ends up in the hands of the wealthy
I think the definition of wealthy requires money end up in someone's hands.
To me this is just free enterprise and private property rights.
Capitalism is more like when the strength of the capital itself gives it a significant or outsized influence compared to the fundamental enterprise and private ownership interest.
Usually when Other People's Money is involved in ways where a chain of resources & debt is built that can influence enterprise and ownership in ways that might not take place otherwise.
Both positive and negative outcomes can be leveraged or exaggerated, for instance in the case of a benevolent capitalist compared to a greedy one.
Edit: not my downvote, bump back up from me
Capitalism is just a system which allows private citizens to own the means of production.
Everything else is just people trying to overload a word to create a savior or boogey man.
Thank you for the vote correction.
I think more than capitalism v. socialism here the problem is that we are governed by filth who are looting public treasuries for themselves and their buddies.
Hence the conservative ideal of smaller government with limited powers, so that there is both less to loot from as well as a lesser ability for those in power to direct those treasures to themselves.
To get any kind of local tax raised, the local authority has to go through the oligarch-controlled legislature in Montgomery, where it would be shot down. And like that you end up with county roads on a 70-year replacement schedule.
We can imagine this enterprise organized another way which actually helps people. Fewer Ferrari dealerships would make sales, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.