Playing devil’s advocate: Being required to pay the government to fund social programs is no good if said government is corrupt.
What’s with the Windows 95 style inset border and black border on this?
First time I read “incest border”. Time to lay off the pornhub.
Help me step-border, my arm is stuck in the drain again.
Where else should it be stuck? 👀
It’s called style, honey
Screenshots have gone too far. Time to learn how to save images properly.
That’s right.
Press the Print Screen button and then paste into a new Word Document.
There is a difference between forced socialism where the government uses their monopoly on violence to compel participation in distribution of resources under duress and personally giving of what you do not need to those who have less.
The store management willingly being charitable in their own community is fantastic and should be encouraged. It is the right way. The community should respond by giving them more business.
The government raising taxes to fund organizations that accomplish nothing of value at a high price while their management grows wealthy should be abolished.
An example is LA spending over $24B over 5 years to address homelessness without meaningful results. That average of $42,000 per person per year should easily handle the problem, even in LA metro. If they spent $75k per person per year, that should result in more than 5x the 45k homeless people LA has being set up in better circumstances. They tout 4.5k people getting off the streets last year as a win.
Compare that to Abode Services that helps 4.4k people every year with an operating budget of $29m.
Letting the government get involved only leads to waste and fraud as entities bid for contracts that they will commit fraud with the funds and nothing of value is done. It creates bloated administrative bodies that are only self-accountable and only have to report some progress to keep being awarded more and more money.
Ah yes socialism bad because some governments don’t work well. And the noedic countries don’t exist I guess
Yes, comrade commissar, this comment right here.
Exactly, there’s a difference between socialism and empathy. A small business should not feel like they have to be charitable toward non customers just to show human decency, to make up for the gaps in our society and to have basic respect for another human. We should feel ashamed that there is such a need. Our society can and should enclosure everyone gets basic needs met
Localized charity like that just increases inequality in the bigger picture. Individuals and individual businesses tend to help the issues they see around them, but they are blind to stuff they don’t know about, and no individual can keep tabs on everything. So people they don’t see (like people who live farther away) are less likely to get help.
Of course, this is a feature to some people, for whom it’s really important to only help people they deem worthy. This unsurprisingly often means only helping their in-group, like their church congregation or their local community. But the people in most need of assistance and the ones the most capable of providing it rarely live in the same area.
It would be far more efficient if a larger-spanning entity (like a larger non-profit charity or government) provided assistance to everyone in a larger area, ensuring everyone has a baseline standard of living. In my experience the Nordic model, where money or subsidized housing is provided by the government to everyone needing it, works quite well. This does not in fact trash the economy, because most people are willing to work to achieve a higher than baseline standard of living.
This reasoning is founded on the idea that there is at any given time a reasonably just distribution of wealth and the capability of the market to fill most any niche that society needs. Neither is even close to true the best way to get more wealth isn’t to do anything in particular it is to already possess it and those who hold the overwhelming majority of wealth act to continually tilt the game board to ensure more of it fills their pockets and absent laws limiting their power and redistributing their wealth inevitably until their entire society collapses.
We and others have been flogging the idea of the market as the solution to all ills for about 3 centuries and their isn’t a nation on earth that is anything remotely like purely capitalistic because there is no fucking reason to believe such a thing could ever work. Every functional nation has a central government which subsists on either a massive pile of material wealth it has appropriated for itself like Saudi Arabia or taxes its citizens to perform many functions that the market is ill suited to provide. If Libertarianism worked why has nobody done it in centuries?
You point out the money spent by LA to address homelessness and treat waste as a natural law when it is a function of a defective system not a specific failing which it so obviously is. We burn a bunch of money pretending to solve homelessness because we are shits. Finland solves it by housing nearly everyone because they are not. Hell social security, medicaid, and medicare proves the government CAN if it sets it’s mind to it help people successfully.
The love the idea of performative goodness which costs them less than a dollar one time which they can then milk endlessly for good vibes with their fellow man buuuuut they really don’t want to come off $300 every month so that the young woman who works in the same establishment can have enough to feed her kids well. It costs a lot more it scales and nobody personally thanks them or sees them being a good person when they pay the IRS to fund this. If they pay the IRS that is.
Orphan crushing machine
Another poor soul saved from the orphan crushing machine. How heartwarming.
A bit off topic, but this is why I avoid communities for “uplifting news”. It sounds like a good concept at first, but then most of the news are based on that.
It’s a design flaw that many people get more satisfaction out of other people’s charitable actions than their own.
Really? I would have said that was a learned behaviour, with all those feel-good stories (& the hype & how it makes them respectable).
I have noticed I initially immediately distrust “charitable” people bcs at best I discovered their empathy is purely visual (like the shellshock of a crying child, but directly confronting to or advancing the causes of that are outside of view so fuck that child, we all gotta do what’s best for us). Not to mention, it has to be public charity, ie they need to get something in return.
Beyond emotional support, charities are only for cases when society already grossly failed, not something we want to see more of.
So many people needing charity for things that arent even scarce, is just horrific & should make us want to make whether changes needed to fix the system.
its a sign on a door, calm down
I don’t want my tax money saving people from destitution. I want that guy to do it so I can read about it on social media.
And they call it doomscrolling! I do it to pat myself on the back!
“But I want credit for my acts of kindness.”
-The Righteous Right
From a Christian perspective, I fell like this is actually quite a difficult issue. While Matthew 6:1-4 is very clear that charitable deeds should be done in secret in order to be rewarded by God, but in a cutthroat society such as ours, sometimes I feel like even the idea that someone, somewhere out there is at least trying to do some good in the world can be a worthwhile reminder that kindness is not dead.
Shame on him if it was an attempt to virtue signal to his paying clients, but if it was a genuine attempt to do some good, I can’t condemn him.
Oh, agreed. I’m not condemning the owner for charity. I’m condemning those who are critical of social programs as a form of ‘forced charity.’
How can I get into heaven if I don’t get the points myself? Collective good works are only half credit.
I think a lot of people read this as “I want credit for my kindness”
I actually think the real animator of the right is much worse.
They want to choose who is deserving of their kindness.
They want to be able to choose who gets help. Person that did something they don’t agree with, no help. Person that’s sympathetic to them, help.
That’s the reason they dislike systematic assistance. Because someone that doesn’t deserve help might get some.
America was so horrified at the sight of bread lines that we stopped giving the bread
Always reminds me of the classic Brecht piece “Saint Joan of the Stockyards” whenever I see celebrations of “charity” like this.
Cup of water 😩😂
Business owners out here thinking that a Pepsi might be too decadent for a dumpster diver.
Seems more like they are trying to provide nutritionally valuable food.
Yeah you are really helping someone with a pepsi…🙄
I don’t know about you, but any sweetened drink like that just dehydrates me more. Regular drinking water or mineral water, that’s it. Nothing else for thirst.
I like some flavor personally. A bit of squeezed lemon or lime is just the right fit.
Though just go an infuser bottle from a friend and fresh cucumber from the garden, so thats this weeks drink of choice!
Honestly, water is better
So how’s your diabetes going?
If we could trust every last person to act on charity, and every person to accept charity only when they need it, socialism wouldn’t be required.
But will this sign change when a small homeless camp sets up on their doorstep?
Supporting the public comes with its own unique set of problems. You need to do this kind of thing at scale, or it will fracture and fall apart.
Exactly. In an ideal world this type of thing would be enough, but that’s not the world we live in, and charity like this is just not going to cut it. That’s not to say that it isn’t a kind gesture, though.
i fully expect they entirely meant well.
Wouldn’t this work better if it was on the dumpster?
Having it on the door makes it performative, doesn’t it
Yep. If it was on the dumpster, they might actually have to give a plate or two away.
You guys are assuming there isn’t one on the dumpster with no evidence of that. You’re creating your own realities based on bias.
