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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

> instinctively repugnant

To some.

In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses. When you have 100 cousins and 10 brothers, this is a viable option.

They frequent each others businesses, work on interconnected industries, and in general help out however they can.

It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community. That seems a more fundamental problem with tax-rich/give-poor mentality. These folks make tons of charitable donations in money, in kind, and in time, but oppose wealth redistribution.

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The hidden issue here is the effort of people with means to shape their community by expelling or excluding people they don’t want to help. Then their voluntary donations etc only help those whom they want to help.

Well-known examples in the U.S. include the use of legal covenants, red lining, Jim Crow laws, and sometimes blatant intimidation to shape who can own which property where. Such changes persist for decades because of the illiquidity of property in general and the compounding effect of wealth discrepancies.

So “outside their communities” is not a neutral, or purely geographic concept. Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.

U.S. governments, in contrast, are ostensibly bound by the republican concept generally and the 14th Amendment specifically, to provide protection and service equally. Even if the citizens in question don’t fit the preferred local definition of “who we want to help.”

Edit add: I’m posting this because I think it helps clarify why some folks want government programs to exist to address social problems, as opposed to just counting on voluntary aid to solve it all.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I think government programs are perfect or without flaws. I actually agree with the comments above that point out how means-tested programs can create incentives to “stand pat” and not try for incremental improvements. It’s policy problem that is well known but hard to fix.

> to provide protection and service equally

That is what the law says. It is not what they do.

> Communities don’t just happen, they are intentionally constructed.

I, personally, agree with your informative pseudo-rebuttal (it's polite and impartial so not really anti-them).

However, the philosophical difference is that

> they are intentionally constructed

is precisely the point, they might say.

I've come to realize, after spending time with them and reading "righteous mind", that the difference is so fundamental it requires a lot more power to cross divides than I have. I simply have to recognize the right and good intent in what they do, rather than denigrate it as "not enough" or "in the slightly wrong direction even if enough".

I imagine a world in which they decline to pay, and therefore to receive, benefits from wealth redistribution, and urbanites who are highly paid like ourselves subsidize other urbanites who are not. I also realize this world would have "rural" covens of uber rich, and so it will not be more just.

I think it is most repugnant when you are working really hard and (very slowly) building your life up.

It was really easy to be charitable when I was young and working meaningless jobs for $15/hr and I had my whole life ahead, and it will probably be easy when I am retired and no longer feel the strain of 50/hr workweeks.

For now though it is brutal watching taxes eat huge chunks of your income so they can spend flagrantly.

I'm in the working stage and it's the most charitable I've ever been, I finally have adult money. I can throw down anywhere from $100-$1000 to help someone on the regular and not even notice.

What makes it so different for you where you have strictly more money than when you were young but have less money in excess? Folks in the comments saying being middle class is harder than being poor are insane to me, this is way better than when I was broke.

> by taking some from those with more and giving it to those with less is almost instinctively repugnant

I think the first part of this statement is crucial to the full meaning. It is not about charity[0]. It is about redistribution of wealth by force is repugnant.

[0] This 2022 reports states US is #3 in charity (giving). https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-resea...

Ah yes, the famous "actually americans donate a lot" nonsense. That report is based on SELF REPORTED donations.

IE, giving Joel Olstein $10k to help him buy a new private jet is considered "charitable giving" and is also considered more charitable than if you just chat up the Asylum family that was just settled next door and help them get integrated into the local community to help them network and find work and friends, despite being way more impactful to human beings than that fucking grifter.

That "research" will also consider donating to, say, an anti-abortion group or an explicitly anti-gay group as "donations", as long as you, the questionee, consider them to be.

Also, being self reported with zero verification of any kind, Americans might just lie more about how much they "give".

The IRS publishes statistics about claimed charitable giving. 2020 tax filers claimed about $150 million in charitable giving if I am reading the report correctly, so less than two dollars per American. That is definitely an undercount since most people who make small contributions do not itemize their taxes and probably don't report their charitable giving, but even that number will be tainted by a person "donating" their money to a charitable organization that they 100% control.

You're ranting incoherently. Americans give the most to non-religious organizations and charities by a wide margin (both individuals, corporations, and the government).

For instance, the US government allocates $7 billion+ annually to the UN World Food Programme [1]. The next biggest donor? $1.7 billion. It's not even close.

And no, $150 million in claimed charitable giving in 2020 is provably false. One ultra-rich individual alone is enough to top that figure.

P.S: I'm not an American.

Giving 7 billion to a food programme is irrelevant when you have policies that enslave Global South to monocropping and force them to import your exports with IP laws (GE seeds) or when you have protectionist subsidies (as U.S. notoriously does) that makes your own exports not competitive. The harm of U.S. policy to the aid recipients is far in excess of 7 billion+, as you claim here.

Of course, it’s always the US’s fault. The Global South won’t take responsibility for electing buffoons as leaders that continually ruin their economies.

Rule no 1 - always blame others.

> The next biggest donor? $1.7 billion. It's not even close.

It's almost, per capita, exactly the same amount - The USA has a pop. of some 333+ million, Germany has a population of some 83 million.

>In very-red areas that I have relatives, they're happy to do a food drive, make donations, help pay for weddings or funerals, or show up to help repair houses

Unless you are gay, trans, not the right kind of christian, have mental issues, are progressive in any way, are willing at all to contradict their absurd views of reality, want cheaper electricity through green energy, want any form of public transit, their family member has beef with you, you dared to question the authority of the local PD, you dare to question that drag queens are a threat, you think maybe gun control could have prevented the local school shooting or that the PD in that town could have done better and should be fired.

The belief that actually rural people are really nice and altruistic is just laughable. Having grown up with them, they will only help you if you are the "right kind" of person, IE, if you are useful or beneficial to them. My white, catholic, french mom in a city of 9000 was completely ostracized, despite knowing every single family, and being a very generous and nice person, because she didn't have the right last name.

Insular rural communities are all about local tyrannies, and local cliques, and if for ANY reason, no matter how tenuous or bullshit or even made up, you WILL be excluded if the local popular club doesn't like you. It's basically high school, which makes sense when you remember most rural communities are entirely made up of people who didn't do anything past high school and basically have not grown beyond that as people.

>It's not instinctively repugnant to help, or to give, it's instinctively repugnant to give outside their community.

These are the same concepts. Being unwilling to help outside your community IS being unwilling to help.

> Unless you are ...

This is a well-trod stereotype, probably for good reason, and it may also be your personal experience, so I'm not going to refute it generally. But this is not the case for the folks I was referring to.

Went looking for literature, this doesn't quite address in-group charity versus general causes, but FWIW:

> All else held constant, rural respondents were almost 5.2 percentage points less likely to be a charitable donor, and donated less, on average, than urban donors, after controlling for human and social capital variables, such as education level, income level, health status, religious affiliation, family composition, and others. Rural respondents were significantly less likely to be donors to secular charities, and gave less on average to secular causes overall. These differences do not exist when comparing the religious giving of rural and urban respondents.

> However, rural donors donated a statistically significantly higher percentage of their income to charity than did urban donors. Also, rural donors are more likely to donate to religious causes than secular causes. Frequent religious attendance is associated with a higher probability of giving for rural residents, as is itemization of deductions on income tax returns.

-- Comparing Donation Patterns of Rural and Urban Donors -- https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/00...

Except for their gay cousin, their atheist cousin, their trans cousin, their mixed-race cousin…

Agreed. As David Harvey says, “wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism”. I suspect he would say that mutual aid is the highest, and counter to many common narratives in our society rural conservatives are very pro mutual aid. I would speculate that it’s primarily wealthy conservatives who own and influence the media that really drive the narratives against other forms of wealth redistribution, while poorer conservatives are more in favor of social safety nets.

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