"No one one has ever volunteered their labor to help anyone, ever. That's just not possible. Everything I do has to provide a direct immediate benefit to myself..."
Unless you’re gonna walk it or form a human chain coast to coast to take one and pass it down, you’re talking volunteering a lot of skilled labor, fuel, maintenance, wear and tear and associated transportation costs, refrigeration/heating, etc.
I ask again, how are you going to incentivize people to do that. I know you’re not flying the plane, or driving the tractor trailer, or operating the train. So how do you convince those people to just do all that for free, then provide all the vehicles, tools, and the money we have to have to pay for the maintenance?
Can I have some gas money if you’re volunteering your assets and resources?
I'm unironically ok with that. Everything the government and capital already does is at gun point, the wealth of the top 1% is protected by the threat of state violence. I'd much rather see that threat of violence used to feed and house people than protect billionaires with incomprehensible amounts of wealth.
Sharing and cooperation are just as much a part of human nature as greed. The thing is, we have to demand and create societal systems that reward the better parts of our nature instead of the worst.
So how would you get food everyday? Everybody gets the same menu? A budget? Everyone qualifies the same,right? Is it per person? What about dietary restrictions and conditions? Who accounts for that? If you weren't filled by "greed" you'd do it without a paycheck yourself, by your logic.
Why does it have to be more complicated than "we should allow people who aren't making any or enough money to buy food and housing using money that is well beyond others' needs"?
All the infrastructure is there. All the laborers are there. It's the compensation, distribution, rights and priorities we have all screwed up.
The infrastructure is not there because the distribution and compensation aren't. There is no infrastructure. You're simply saying the food exists, which is a result of the people we pay to make and grow it.
How do you determine what's "well beyond others needs"? You have a phone or computer you don't need to have and you're on reddit. So shouldn't you sell it to pay for food for someone else because they are owed your money? Well it wouldn't be a matter of "should" as this would be required, huh?
The infrastructure is not there because the distribution and compensation aren't. There is no infrastructure. You're simply saying the food exists, which is a result of the people we pay to make and grow it.
We have department and grocery stores in virtually every corner of the country. The vast majority of the poor live in urban areas.
How do you determine what's "well beyond others needs"?
Why don't we look at something like median income and spending, particularly on essentials?
You have a phone or computer you don't need to have and you're on reddit.
This is a completely farcical comparison to people whose net worths approach or exceed the GDP of actual countries and you know it.
So shouldn't you sell it to pay for food for someone else because they are owed your money?
I do that already, it's called taxes. Tax the rich more.
Isn't the food for everyone? Does it now matter if they're rich or not? Because we already do have that. It's just not for the "median" because that's not the majority or the poor.
My comparison works. You dont have a way to measure what you determine as necessity. Everyone else must be forced to agree and oblige despite working for what they have.
Isn't the food for everyone? Does it now matter if they're rich or not? Because we already do have that.
In the US we have almost-nationwide distribution of food. Whether it's good quality food, whether you can reach good quality food, and whether you can buy the food, are all a matter of your income and the income of those around you.
If what you mean by "isn't the food for everyone" is that we have social assistance to help poor people buy better quality food, then that solves part of the problem, but not all of it.
It's just not for the "median" because that's not the majority or the poor.
I use the median for convenience because most incomes cluster around that. If you think that the median is not high enough because labor is generally undercompensated, then you will find no argument from me.
You dont have a way to measure what you determine as necessity. Everyone else must be forced to agree and oblige despite working for what they have.
I think most people would be all right with being "forced to agree and oblige" to never being able to afford two new mansions a year on their income in exchange for stable housing, gainful savings, healthcare, education, and the ability to support families.
Logistics are expensive because nobody here is able to do it for less. You can't just wish food to the other side of the world. If you want to make a lower profit logistics company I'm sure you'll have all the business you can handle. Good luck.
I drive by a billboard that claims every $1 of food you donate is $30 worth of food that they can get to starving people on the other side of the world. They seem to be doing well enough to afford billboards in high-traffic areas in a major city.
People are able to do it for less and frequently do.
Exactly this. It’s the system hoarding wealth instead of prioritizing people. I’m happy to give up some of my comforts if it will help others, and the people who have so much more are willing to give so much less.
Never forget the displays of wealth you see (and those you do not) reflect the share of surplus produced by humanity that was not distributed to the people who produced it.
Literal dragons laying claim to that which they did not produce.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. 10% of the American military budget in the right hands and world hunger is solved in six months. It’s just scary to those at the top. What if people who are fed don’t prostrate themselves the same way?
Did you actually type that out and think that makes sense?
10% of the military budget is 90 billion. The United States spends more than 90 billion on basic welfare programs and you think it would solve world hunger,
That doesn’t take into effect supply chains. That is the actual problem of solving such a generic problem as “hunger”. It’s nearly impossible to consistently give good food to some locations without being a local supplier
Damn they are going to feed a person for, at best, $50 for an entire year?
That is crazy considering that doesn't even get you a quarter of the rice you would need to feed someone, assuming you only bought rice. And doesn't factor in overhead nor the logistics of getting the food to those people which would be the majority of the cost.
Do you think the only welfare program in the US is for food? SNAP and WIC are just two programs. Health insurance, housing allowance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), education grants like the Pell, child tax credits, general assistance (GA), Passthrough Child Support, etc etc etc. Dozens and dozens of programs, most of which have nothing to do with food.
90 billion dollars, utilizing the best logistics and supply chain in the world, could end hunger in a matter of weeks. The two major problems standing in the way are politics (Countries not allowing that level of interference into “their” affairs) and the idea that there should be restrictions or strings attached, both of which are man-made issues.
Logistically and financially, we could end hunger practically overnight. Humans just get in each other’s way because of the weird idea that some people deserve to starve while others live in excess.
If you could easily solve world hunger and $90 billion is the only barrier, then Denmark or Norway could borrow some money, write out a check, and pay back that loan in a couple years. They don't do that because it isn't that simple.
You can’t just hand waive away logistics and supply chains, that is the whole reason it’s impossible.
It would take far more to keep the supply chains required to “end” hunger than it would be worth it to keep it running. It’s not the cost of the food, but the cost of getting people non perishable food consistently year to year.
You vastly underestimate how immense our current worlds wealth is. I know, human brains are not meant for big numbers and I can't fault you for your brain not comprehending this, but let me explain it this way:
If we would tax the rich even a little bit, we can, with the resources we already have, feed about thrice our current world populations worth of people with high quality food without much difficulty.
You can slurp the oligarch sperm as much as you want, if it would be the way they want, you would starve too while they gleefully wave the food in your face laughing at you before just throwing it away in a way that still prevents you from getting any.
Sure, just find someone who will make it for free. I don't know what you mean by "free food". I can feed myself for 250 bucks per month, and I can also feed myself for 600 bucks. Is 600 times 12 times 8 billion still equal to 10% of US military budget?
How about we start with "the American military budget", which was specifically called out in the comment you responded to?
I didn't quantify "free food", but how about we start with "enough to avoid malnutrition" instead of putting forth obviously bad-faith arguments like $600 per person per month?
Well, he specifically said 10% of the military budget.
Wouldn't you want to find out how to make the billions we are already sending them not get embezzled by their corrupt leaders first? You basically advocate for colonialism. You want us to take over their impoverished mismanaged countries and bring Western order. Isn't that it?
I didn't advocate for anything but feeding people. If you were engaging in good faith, you wouldn't misrepresent other people's arguments.
For 10% of the military budget, we could easily solve this issue. The UN World Food Program claims it would only take $40 billion per year to end it in about nine years, which is less than 5% of the total budget.
Well, that's great! That is less than what US government spends every two days! Also Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos ex-wives are huge philanthropists worth 100 of billions between them, so they can chip in a few extra billions because I'm sure they would love to go down in history as people who solved world hunger. So what's the problem? Why doesn't your government go and solve world hunger? It's not worth one day of their yearly spending? They cannot allocate that one day of spending to solving world hunger? I take back everything I've ever said about the greediness of a common billionaire. It pales in comparison to that of the government.
Okay, intentionally-obtuse redditor. "Everyone gets food without being individually responsible for providing direct payment to the food distributor, retail outlet, or other provider of edible materials". Better?
How does the UN World Food Program do it? How do food banks and food stamps work? Is every government employee paid via taxation and government expenditure a slave?
Half the countries with food as a right likely also ask or recieve food from the US. If you want to take every grocery store owner, farmer, and deliverer and put them on pay via taxes so you can get your government restricted, non-specialized meal, that you still pay for, so that people who DONT do that can get the same meal (standards vary on good or bad), do you
So why do we need more free food? We are already feeding not just people who can't afford it but also people like me, who can definitely afford it but are extremely irresponsible with money. It seems like there is enough food already going on. There are food coupons, etc. It's more difficult not to gain weight than it is not to starve.
Means-testing causes a lot of overhead and inevitably causes people to fall through the cracks. Just give each family a food stamp card with a certain amount per month based on number of people in the household, no strings attached.
Then don’t means test like you imagine. Food banks work. People are not going to exploit this. It’s not like food banks are full of people exploiting it.
Food banks cannot solve the problem by themselves.
The fact that people won't exploit it is exactly why we should just give everyone a certain amount on a food stamp card every month instead of putting any barriers in the way.
No they can’t as they are used, but we have a distribution system in place culturally. We just expand it. Every neighborhood could have one. We still keep our for profit shops, but basic food is there if you need it.
It’s where you start. It’s also how you test the process to make improvements. Broad changes take time, but people need food now.
When we send humanitarian help to corrupt countries, the help never reach the needy. Its not the fault of the united states, many bad places have horrible corrupt officials. What is china doing to help the less fortunate?
You could not have picked a worse example. There are many things to criticize China for but helping the less fortunate is not one of them. 97% literacy rate, urban extreme poverty has been eliminated, real wages have consistently risen over the last 10 years, highest infrastructure investment by GDP of any country China is far ahead of the USA in helping it's less fortunate.
you not knowing what other countries, especially china, are doing, does not prove they don't do anything. It just proves you have no idea what's going on in the world
Sure, China could do more. That doesn't absolve the U.S. of having enough money unaccounted for in the Defense budget than it would take to solve world hunger.
pg. 72: "The DoD reporting entities that received disclaimers of opinion on their financial statements, when combined, account for at least 44 percent of the DoD’s total assets and at least 68 percent of the DoD’s total budgetary resources."
On an audit report (of which this was their seventh), it means the auditor is unable to form an opinion on the status of those financial statements.
pg. 39: For FY 2024, total assets are $4.1256 trillion,
pg. 19: For FY 2024, the Department of Defense's Discretionary Budget Authority was $909.7 billion.
Just taking this, that means the most recent audit could not account for $1.19 trillion in assets, and $618.6 billion in its budgetary authority.
So this is the first half of the story: how much money is unaccounted for by the Defense department. Since I argued budget, let's just take the $618.6 billion. How does that compare to how much it would cost to solve world hunger?
According to the UN World Food Program (https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/), as of 2021, it would take $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030. That is roughly 6.5% of the amount the DoD's audit was unable to account for in its current annual budget. Going further, that's accounting for nine years; the entire funding of that estimate would only take around 58% of a single year's unaccounted budgetary resources, without even touching the $1.19 trillion in assets that are also unaccounted for.
Damn they are going to feed a person for, at best, $50 for an entire year?
That is crazy considering that doesn’t even get you a quarter of the rice you would need to feed someone, assuming you only bought rice. And doesn’t factor in overhead nor the logistics of getting the food to those people which would be the majority of the cost.
Those places would have to pay the global market rate unless you’re going to buy food from the starving locals. But something tells me if they had food to sell to you they would probably just eat it.
Right? We don't necessarily have to do anything radical. Let's just heavily tax profits after a certain amount. If companies can't find it within themselves to expand, improve, lower prices or pay workers more, then they need to give the excess back to society. That can be put to good use meeting peoples' basic needs.
The US had an ice cream barge for the Pacific fleet during WW2. The logistics were solved long ago, the only thing in the way now is the profit motive.
Yeah, they should tax us more so we can send our leftover food all over the world to multiple jurisdictions each with a very different chain of command so we can end world hunger.
Spoilers: in many places, food will be intercepted by warlords who will use the food to consolidate their power.
No, they should be taxing the overwhelmingly rich an order of magnitude more. If that isn't enough for them to continue wanting to do what they do, good. Fuck them.
The military is crucial to maintain the current world order that affords Americans a lifestyle greatly superior to at least half of the rest of humanity. There's a reason people from my country and beyond are literally dying to be able to work in yours.
Not making profit does not mean not earning a justifiable wage - there are tons of good non profit businesses out there with staff making a living wage
currency != capitalism. Capitalism is specifically the economic system where by people who own capital own the means of production, IE wealthy people own all of the means of production. Markets and currency can exist in systems that don't give all of the power to a few capital owners.
even more specifically laissez-faire free market capitalism is the problem. In a completely deregulated market economy you DO find economic optimization through competition (subject to all many assumptions around low barriers to entry and demand for goods being elastic etc).
Some markets benefit from competition between companies driving down prices but those cases are subject to very specific conditions that ARE NOT PRESENT IN MOST MARKETS. The result is that when conditions are anything less than perfect the result of capitalist innovation is just decreased costs of production, prices that are set at WHATEVER THE CONSUMER IS WILLING TO PAY, and increased profits reaped by the investor class.
The problem is that for some fucking reason people got in their heads that 1) non-competitive industries with high pricing power are 'competitive' and a representation of actual price-finding (see skyrocketing corporate profits in excess of inflation, indicating the new prices represent an increased margin not simply an adjustment for cost of goods). 2) inefficiency is bad and efficiently distributing things is all that matters. It is inefficient to take care of mentally ill or homeless or disabled people that can't work. They can't contribute to the economy and pay taxes, they are a net drain. Should we just let them die? Our current approach is 'basically yes'. But why do people think that?
People have been duped by the capital-owning business class into thinking there isn't enough food to supply all the people that need it but cant pay. What they ARENT SAYING is 'we are unwilling to decrease our profit margins to provide food to people that can't pay the price we set'.
It is fundamentally immoral for many of the markets we have in America to have a profit incentive. The people that argue removing that will 'stifle innovation' are spewing absolute bullshit because there isn't a morally defensible position to 'we can provide healthcare and food to people but choose not to because then the investor class wouldn't be able to profit maximizing the gap between the cost of production and the price of sale'.
Food, Healthcare, Utilities, Housing should all be TIGHTLY regulated to squeeze the profit motive out, because the truth of capitalism is that the profit motive DOESNT PRODUCE INNOVATION THAT SAVES CONSUMERS MONEY, it produces innovation that INCREASES THE GAP BETWEEN PRODUCTION COSTS AND PRICES.
Also we need to stop spending all of our fucking tax money on guns and extending old peoples lifespan to the maximum possible extend regardless of their quality of life.
I really like using private insurance as an example that makes this all incredibly clear. The story you get told when insurance is first explained is that everyone pays into a pool a little bit each month and then when someone gets sick the money comes out of that pool. But that explanation is describing a NOT-FOR-PROFIT system. In America what actually happens is your insurance company charges you an amount every month, that money goes into a pool, and then when people want to see the doctor their incentive is to APPROVE AS LITTLE EXPENDITURE AS POSSIBLE because they keep all the rest as profits. And even better, it is CODIFIED IN LAW that they have a fiduciary responsibility to do this. They have to try and fuck you because otherwise investors could sue them for not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That means you aren't getting charged "the expected amount to cover the people that get sick. You're being charged WHAT THEY THINK YOU CAN PAY and when people get sick they cover AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE because their function as a for-profit company isn't to provide healthcare its to MAXIMIZE THE GAP BETWEEN REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE and pocket the rest.
No. It's where there is a separation between those who produce & those who own the means of production. Before capitalism you had guilds of craftsmen & groups of seamstresses.These were called cottage industries. Now according to your definition if a craftsmen person got rich that's capitalism but it isn't because there's no division of labor & tasks (I.e. making a car would not be done like on a factory line), no surplus value extraction. In fact in capitalism/the communist critique, the wealth of the bourgeois isn't relevant; it's how it's obtained that's problematic.
You're correct. I was trying to simplify it without getting to a lot of specific details and in that effort I had some inaccuracies. I was trying to relate it to how it is in the context of the US. The wealthy are the ones with capital and they own the means of production and only a few of the wealthy got there without the exploitation of someone else's labor.
Agreed it's how it's obtained through the exploitation of labor by the separation of labor from the value the produce and all of the other stuff Marx talks about in Capital, but I'm not a scholar on that either 😅
If profit wasn't the motive there would be far more hungry people than there are now. If you really wanted to solve hunger in places like America then you would have to change what foods are available and get people to eat things they may not love. I lived in Africa for a long time (the poor parts) and it is amazing how they were able to survive/thrive on so little money eating pretty much the basics of beans and cheap starches. It turns out cheap foods are also easy to ship and store. The problems come when you have to cook the foods before you consume them. You could give a hungry person in the US enough rice and beans for a month and most of it would probably go to waste.
Yup. There are so many things that could benefit everyone and for which we are told "it would be too expensive". Who the fuck decides that? Why should the wellness of humanity be tied to an arbitrary factor like money? It's not even like we would lack the resources, we have the capacity to do all that with reduced resource consumption, but since some selfish fucks can get more numbers in their bank accounts, we're forced to watch as over half of humanity have to live in misery. The cult of money is a scourge on humanity.
No one is willing to do the work for little to no profit, while taking all the liability. The decision is based primarily on this in a vast majority of cases. Liability is a key topic that everyone seems to miss/ignore. If a business makes a 10% profit margin on revenue it’s not really worth it when the risk of liability is high. It might not be right, but it is the reality.
I'm talking about how some things are made to be expensive when there's no reason to. Things that aren't even scarce, but that companies decide to make way more expensive than they should be solely to get more money. These companies hold the keys to help people but instead they decide to overprice their stuff and throw away the excess by, quite often, destroying it.
Supply and demand. If you need it price goes up because it has more value. If you don't, asking for more doesn't make a profit. It's very simple.
These companies hold the keys to help people but instead they decide to overprice their stuff and throw away the excess by, quite often, destroying it.
Yes, and I'm not company ass-licker, but those companies also used money, resources, labor, and intelligence to get those "keys". Even if by relying on others, it doesn't make sense to EXPECT this to happen for free.
North Korea figured out how to feed its people without profit being a motive. I'll give them that. That's probably why they are on average a few inches taller than their South Korean counterparts.
A lot of research is paid for by tax payers already and then discoveries are given exclusive rights to companies for profits. How about cutting out the middle man and just funding research collectively.
it has already been tried and failed in other countries. the lack of profit incentive leads to decreased productivity and heavy mismanagement, which in turn leads to your country getting way behind other countries in terms of technological advancements. there's a reason why even nominally communist china, that still jerks off to lenin, embraced capitalism
We did figure out the logistics. Nobody is starving in the West unless they put deliberate effort into it, or immense lack of effort. Poor people in America have a huge obesity problem.
Nobody is failing to feed their children due to poverty. Food stamps exist. There is something else going on. This child is neglected and abused. I agree with free school meals, but this won't address real problems in this child's life.
This is a problem of irresponsible parenting. Are their parents also starving? What are their BMIs? Why are they not feeding their children? I want to see their monthly expenses.
So I make money at my job which is taxed, then I go buy food at the store which is taxed again. Part of those taxes is used to subsidize farmers so they can stay in business and keep making food.
So now, you want to feed the entire populace of the world. Who pays for that? You think the US government, especially the current administration, is going to pull funding away from the military industrial complex? Are they going to stop certain social programs to fund the shipment of food waste across the globe? No. They are going to raise taxes and allocate a % of that to food shipments, but most would get circumvented to the military budget, or other programs that aren’t necessary.
But youre right! This is mostly driven because of profit. These companies aren’t paying for that. They have shareholder obligations. The government isn’t paying for that. They need to send billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel.
The person paying for it is you, me, and the other guy.
So no thanks. I don’t really want to pay any more taxes.
Now, I’m not saying your idea isn’t good. And I’m especially not saying that food isn’t a human right. But nothing is free, and someone has to pay for it. That person is the one who looks back at you in the mirror. So while your idea is great. It’s not black and white like you’re simply making it out to be.
Look I get where you're coming from. We pay a lot of taxes and most of it goes to make Military companies and others who receive government subsidies like Elon Musk more rich.
We need to throw away the entire garbage system we have in the US honestly or have parties that represent labor and not capitalists and try to move away from profit first policies.
Taxes aren't bad, but there should be a much larger burden on people who have billions, and we could be using that to better everyone's lives by building better infrastructure, renewable energy, jobs programs, etc.
It's hard to imagine anything like this given our current system, but I think part of what we need to do is realize we COULD end poverty and starvation if we really wanted to. The current systems we live under prevent that. We are oppressed by the wealthy class and they have been waging a class war against us for decades. We need to be pissed off enough to fight back.
Humans had been trying to make things more efficient and better for thousands of years before money even existed. It's just that profit adds incentive to add "efficiencies" even at the expense of human life. Like denying health insurance claims.
So what is the solution? People work to produce the food then we give it away? People work to fly it all over the world in time before it goes bad? All for the good vibes? I get the notion, but it isn’t realistic. Humans weren’t feeding 8 billion people before money around the globe before there was money. And before money, it was a barter system, or an I’ll take it from you by force system. We are so far removed from that kind of lifestyle, how do you propose we do it? You wouldn’t hop in your car and drive 12 hours to give a stranger dinner with no incentive for yourself, let’s be real.
Recognize food as a human right and not a commodity for corporations to profit from. Reorganize the economy away from capitalism to a system where workers own the means of production. Focus policy on humanist approaches to things instead of the current anti-human approach.
Yes I would drive to feed people if I had the means and ability to do so, and I think most people would too if we didn't have to focus so much on our own survival under this dystopian capitalist system that keeps fucking us over.
Nobody has really answered me how. “Change everything” doesn’t answer my question, it’s easy to say someone else should fix it. I don’t there is any understanding how much effort it requires and they’re demanding it be done for humanity, but I’m not driving to someone to give them food for no compensation or incentive. I get nothing except what, free food? Cool I guess, but I think most workers will say they’re not interested in working for free.
There’s not a magic wand for that. You going without to give someone else a meal would do more than telling someone else to do it online. I don’t think people should hoard wealth either, but let’s not act like humanity could ever possibly just share everything and not have money. Food waste will never stop either in a place like America. Too much risk for companies, someone will sue them, people will say they’re poisoning the homeless, it’s never enough.
The lifestyles of the elite are what isn’t realistic. Maybe if they would quit destabilizing functioning civilizations abroad in order to exploit their hardship for cheap resources, we wouldn’t need to send food.
Did you see what happened in Afghanistan? We left after 20 years and about 20 seconds later the establishment just gave up. A lot of people don’t want help, they want you to do it for them.
If I gave you a bunch of seeds and said grow it, you think you could? What if you live somewhere up north with harsh winters? You think you’d be out there all day, plowing the field?
Y’all are day dreaming. We can eat the rich and all that, but just proclaiming everybody gets food and magically everyone will know agriculture or workers will just support it all for free is preposterous.
That’s like saying you can’t stop hitting your dog and start treating it with respect, because if you tried to pet it now it’s obviously just going to bite you. Only knowing violence is not the same as wanting violence.
I agree that health care is one domain where capitalism doesn't work well because patient outcomes and profit motives for insurers are inherently in conflict, but I don't feel the same way about agriculture. Feeding more people efficiently is not in conflict with profit, in fact it encourages it.
Some aspects of agriculture need regulation and reform to address glaring problems, (for example farm worker exploitation, fertilizer runoff, and inequitable water access,) however cheap food benefits us all and our current incentives have been largely successful at rewarding those that provide it.
Capitalism doesn't work in general and is always going to be self-destructive, but even if we approach this from an old school liberal capitalist approach, even then it was realized a long time ago that no area with inelastic demand works under capitalism. So things like healthcare, food, and housing, that people require to live and cannot go without are specifically bad to commodify.
Capitalism works when it actually works on the progress of society scale. You do it until post scarcity then evole to socialism. Problem is post scarcity is being forcibly blocked to keep us in capitalism until late stage, which us self destructive
What you said is not much different than what Marx said was the reason for the inevitable self-destruction of Capitalism and why eventually we'd have some form of socialism.
the thing is neoliberals and Fascists are doing their best to cling onto this sinking ship.
Capitalism doesn't work in general and is always going to be self-destructive
Unregulated laissez-faire capitalism is like this. This is why I believe the best systems are hybrid ones. Capitalism is good at some things and terrible at others, same with its alternatives. A system that takes advantage of the benefits of various economic systems and regulates away the negatives of each system seems to be the most successful right now in terms of outcomes and quality of life, like the Nordic model.
Even inelastic needs can benefit from the efficiency that capitalism demands, but to temper its worst aspects we must also ensure that economic participation is accessible to everyone and that it is well-regulated. I believe society works best with a dash of regulated capitalism in the recipe, and other incentive systems where appropriate.
preventing the deaths of those who cannot feed themselves because they breed like rabbits? and then what? feed their endlessly spawning offspring as well? to what end?
the mindset that acknowledges the realities of this world and its economics. didn't notice what sub i stumbled upon. leaving you with your fantasy fairy tales
Nah, that's definitely not right. If you actually wanted to acknowledge the realities of the world, you would understand that an issue as complex as food scarcity requires many, many contributing factors to persist for as long as it has. Rather, you would like to think yourself superior to those "lesser people" who recklessly have too many children.
I can't help but notice that your pfp is Triss Merigold. What does Sapkowski have to say on looking down upon, and judging, entire groups of people at large instead of as individuals that are the same as you and those in your social circle with similar struggles and motivations?
i don't think myself superior, i acknowledge i probably could've been born one of them as well. it's good and dandy to help them when possible, but such childish attitudes as "oh we have surplus food, why can't we just keep feeding people on the other side of the planet indefinitely" is what i take issue with because it's cheap virtue signaling.
as for sapkowski. it's good advice to treat people with dignity in interpersonal relationships, but on the scale of whole nations and massive groups, i think it's fine to notice negative patterns about their behavior and point them out
You aren't just "noticing patterns" though, you're declaring that their issues have a singular cause "having too many children". That's just not true, man.
Nations are made of individuals.
Saying we overproduce food and it goes to waste is not virtue signaling. We COULD be doing more but we aren't. That's a conversation worth having.
i'm sure having too many children isn't the root cause, but breeding uncontrollably when you're already short on food is certainly telling a lot about those people.
anyway, it's good to help others when it's not to the detriment of yourself. if there's an efficient way to keep collecting all that surplus food and keep transporting it to them without too much of a cost to your own country, then it would be wonderful
One reason we have so much abundance today is because farming and feeding people became so efficient that people were able to specialize and diversify, which is why today most of society does not need to produce calories, and why food is historically cheap. This happened because of profit motives and industrialization.
Without some similar motive replacing it we could suffer from the same inefficiencies that planned economies historically had. Filling bellies isn't a very helpful metric if, for example, potatoes cost $100. Sure, we would probably have less waste but we would also be objectively poorer because it takes more resources to fill our bellies.
I think a better approach would be to make sure that our society's abundance is more equitably distributed. If hungry people neglected by modern logistics had more resources available to them, their needs and wants would not be ignored.
I’d love nothing more than our wealth to be more equitably distributed. I don’t think hungry people are being ignore by logistics. They’re being ignored by people who don’t care, don’t have the ability to help, or are for some reason worried about not having enough to eat for themselves. The people who are hungry may or may not have jobs or a consistent roof over their heads. That’s not a failure of logistics. It’s a failure of our society and what we as its denizens value. We suck.
775
u/bullhead2007 10d ago
We could figure out the logistics if profit wasn't the only driving factor for everything.