3w ago

There is no good reason why there is still homelessness and poverty

We have so many houses going unused. We have food and resources for everybody, but we've set up a system that arbitrarily concentrates most of it on a few people! Young children, with no understanding why society is this way, are suffering and dying because they live in a world that collectively agrees to let this happen unnecessarily

Fuck, I'm stoned but you know I'm right

Edit: and the sad thought hits me: the first step is realizing the system doesn't have to be this way, the second step is realizing it isn't going to change, at least not any time soon

106 comments

"Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich,"
As an example of how stupid our global civilization is ... Africa has more than enough wealth and natural resources to produce all the food and water it needs to feed its own people without any outside influence or control. Unfortunately, first world countries have such a stranglehold on African nations and governments that they are forever beholden to foreign aid and manipulation that they will never be able to pay off their debts ... which means African will forever pay first world countries and never be capable of standing on their own.
Also, I've been sober from alcohol and drugs for close to 30 years now .... and I'm perfectly aware of all this and think about this stuff all the time. We don't need mind altering drugs to understand how stupid, greedy and corrupt our world is, has always been and will always be until we destroy ourselves and free this planet of our own stupidity.
- Also, I've been sober from alcohol and drugs for close to 30 years now .... and I'm perfectly aware of all this and think about this stuff all the time. We don't need mind altering drugs to understand how stupid, greedy and corrupt our world is, has always been and will always be until we destroy ourselves and free this planet of our own stupidity.
  You have to remember that most people, especially Americans, are brainwashed from birth to believe that the current order of the affairs is the best and only way to operate a society, and that anything else is, ahem, communism, which is the worst possible thing there is. For many, psychedelics has been the most impactful way for an individual to actually think outside the box on a visceral level since their conditioning since birth has been one of "this is the only way to think, so hop on board lest you be cast out of society." It's the entire reason why these substances are illegal, can't have people thinking for themselves out of lockstep with the prescribed mentality.
  
  youd think that but ik plenty of ppl that do psychs and still are republican/trump supporters, if anything they doubled down harder, it can go both ways

Yes. Though capitalism/fascism is the reason, it's not good.
- Faschitalism
  
  Where did the h come from

Poverty is a necessary component of capitalism. It's not arbitrary, it's calculated.
- It's not a bug, it's a feature.
- Yes but I'm saying there's no good reason why we use capitalism instead of something better
  
  Because the people in power benefit from the status quo, and they'll sooner blow up the planet than live in a world where they're not on top.
  
  I know what you're saying, I'm just raising the class question. There are "good" reasons for the rich to use capitalism, after all.
  
  b..but..but that would be SOCIALISM!
  
  The reason is that it's extremely difficult to reach a consensus as to what that "better" thing is.

Actually, it's because of capitalism. It's not a good reason but it is the reason. Everybody knows that we throw away food every single day that could literally feed the whole planet twice over. Everyone knows that we can manage to put everyone under a roof. The billionares sure as hell know this but they want to keep the status quo because they know as long as nobody actually does anything about it, they'll always be the 1% with everything—and so the rat race continues.

Wait until you hear the true story of the Irish Potato Famine and realize that not only did nobody learn from it, but most of the anglosphere seems to be towards a direct repeat of it at an even wider scale.

a system that arbitrarily concentrates most of it on a few people
It's not arbitrary.
And the reason it's so much worse now is the distribution.
If one family owned a company, they'd value long term brand loyalty over quarterly profits.
With a corporate board, they all own a piece that's easily sold, and a whole bunch of other people who don't have "enough" already. There's no focus on long term company health, just that the percent return increases.
That's just not sustainable.
So large corps but up companies, run them into the ground, then sell them off. Often replacing with shitty knockoff quality products under the same brand.
A private owner can be satisfied, a board will always demand the numbers go up.
- Even worse is that they try to gaslight society into thinking the poors are leeches and parasites on society, while it's been them all along.
- That is why I think stock ownership should be for a minimum term, like bonds.
  10 year minimums. That should turn it back into an investment vehicle it was always supposed to be.
  
  Minimum terms before sale and preventing use as collateral on loans are two very simple pieces of legislation that would make a huge difference in wealth inequality.
- The whole system modeled on infinite growth is not sustainable. The population is aging and we’re running out of markets and increased competition abroad. We’ve hit the end of the road for the post WW2 era. The American model in almost every industry just milks and extorts the working class and they are running out. Between big pharma price gouging citizens, banks trying to deregulate, and big tech out of any innovation just making harmful advertising/surveillance capitalism. They are running out of ways to extort and keep maximizing profits without harming citizens. They are trying to seize more control and influence of the government because of this.
- So large corps but up companies, run them into the ground, then sell them off.
  Look up who is allowed to invest in large corps and who is allowed to invest into start-ups and it will make sense. (Only rich investors for start-ups allowed.)
  Downvote says it doesn't make sense without an explanation. By using start-ups for innovation, high profit rates are kept among rich people.

I always get annoyed at people jump on all the justifications about how just handing someone a house isn’t enough to set these people’s lives right, and I’m like, “Right. ‘Cause the street will definitely help themselves get back on track. That lack of shelter is an attitude problem.”

Every year capitalists kill 10 million people by withholding food, medicine, and clean water. All because it isn’t profitable to them personally.
- This. This is the reality and the root cause of a lot of the issues regarding homelessness, starvation and preventable illness in the world.
  Aggressive capitalists value money more than anyone's, and everyone's life.
  They will let you die to bump their profits a fraction of a percent.
- 10 million in the usa? or where?
  
  Those are the worldwide numbers for starvation and preventable disease, roughly.
- Just FYI this is a tankie account.

I can tell you right now why nothing happens. Because those of us who have housing and a solid life are terrified it will be taken away if others are given what they worked for (I realize this to be false, however it's a very common sentiment among 30-40 year olds who own homes or property of any kind).
So, they keep voting for farther and farther right politicians because the left wants to "take your guns, land, and make you live under communism!" This is a non-exaggerated thought process of how a lot of people think.
- Fuck that i only have a house so i don't have to pay someone else's mortgage.
  
  I bought it the wrong time. I had a house and paid for 15 years lost $200,000 in the sale.
  I would have actually done quite well to rent instead.

A quick look at the Wikipedia article The world's billionaires will reveal that billionaires have an estimated aggregate net worth of 16 trillion. That's more than 2,000 dollars for every single human being on this planet. Maybe not as individuals, but as a collective, they literally have the possibility of ending world hunger. And that's only the richest three thousand or so.
- If the world taxed them all only half their wealth (keeping them billionaires) and took the results and invested it in a trust, it could be generating 80 billion a year from only a 1% return. That's enough to solve world hunger every year twice.
  The world doesn't have a resource problem. It has a billionaire problem.
  
  I recommend a good read: Poverty, by America - Matthew Desmond – Princeton (2023)
  ~~We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another. – Leo Tolstoy
  The passage of Proposition 13 inspired a nationwide revolt that led to Reagan’s 1981 cutting spree. It was a white-led revolt. Only 2 groups opposed Proposition 13: public sector employees and African Americans. Massive tax cuts fundamentally reshaped the agendas of the nation’s 2 major political parties and resulted in the rise of private fortunes alongside public poverty. This was a response to white people being ordered to share public goods with Black people. ~~
  How to fix?
  In the USA:
  We just have to stop spending so much on the rich. Support policies that disrupt poverty, not accommodate it. In 2020, the gap separately everyone in America below the poverty line and the poverty line itself amounted to $177 billion. That’s less that 1% of our GDP.
  I’m calling for the rich to pay their taxes. Rebalance our social net. Return to a time when America made bigger investments in the general welfare.
  “We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.” - theologian Walter Bruggemann
  Make sure all women have access to the best contraception and healthcare, and more pregnancies become intentional and safer. Provide new mothers with paid parental leave and free childcare. A country as wealthy as ours could put our money where our mouth is and support life. But from the poor, we just seem to take and take.~~
  Let’s choose businesses that are doing right by their workers and the planet.
  Doing the right thing is often highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly. That’s the price for our restored humanity.
  Prosperity without poverty carries a different feeling. We’d be more free. A nation invested in ending poverty is a nation that is truly committed to freedom.
- The worst part is: the wealthiest few of them could each, individually, if they wanted to, end world hunger permanently with their current wealth. Estimates I've read range $40b per year or something like $250-300b just once to set up sustainable long-term solutions globally.
  Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos could end hunger globally and permanently. Any one of them, individually, could do it. If the richest 10 billionaires all pitched in a portion, they'd all recoup everything they spent within a couple years at worst. If the richest 100 did, many of them wouldn't even notice the expenditure.
  But it would only take 1 of them.
- Not my line- but you can have billionaires or you can have democracy.

A fun read is A Modest Proposal
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

Everyone else already mentioned this... Methinks the fundamental issue is wealth distribution, so yes it is capitalism. I would say it is a "good" reason as it is a major target for sociology research and politicians, and there are active efforts in some countries to reduce inequality so...
I think I was radicated by this back in second year of college... Professor mentioned something like "The US Midwest has enough production capacity to feed the entire world" when a lot of the crops went to beef production, sweeteners, or just waste
This has been an issue for a while and I think Cory Doctorow mentioned it in one of his blog posts? About the Luddites; they were not anti-technology, but saw how the productivity increases would only benefit the rich and wealthy. I suspect the current AI issue is the same, "robots replacing your job" will be a lot more positive if the replaced worker still makes the same amount via basic income/stipend by the government instead of the money being concentrated into OpenAI or Meta or somewhere
... I've wanted to talk about these for a while
- For those reasons I believe ai will be a net negative for all humanity in a capitalist system. It serves to further enrich billionaires and create a police state for the rest of us.
  Now if it wasn't this way, you could use ai as a tool to potentially do good (im still not a fan of it) but we know this will never happen. So id advise anyone to boycott any ai shit that keeps getting shoved into our faces. I will deny it until I have to go live in a shack in the woods to do so.

A punishment for undesireability.
When you're too old, too uneducated, too unattractive, too disabled, too beligerent, or an obstacle to further extraction, you're rendered homeless.
Homelessness is a socially acceptable method of eugenics. A homeless person has no right to property or personhood. They can be abused, imprisoned, and executed without excuse or much effort.
Homelessness is, at its heart, a form of social murder.
- But part of what makes one homeless is bad luck. Generally, a person with a terrible personality who cannot behave appropriately will end up being an outcast.............on the other hand they could end up being president
  
  Trump was rewarded for regurgitating a philosophy of eugenics that a bunch of other Silicon Valley psychos believe in.

The reason is greed, wealth facilitates the accumulation of more wealth.
Significant wealth needs to be taxed asap or the next generation will know nothing but perpetual poverty from birth until death.
- So when are you planning to get your vasectomy?

Reality is rather complicated

But have you thought about all those CEOs and bilionaires of the world?
- Fuck em
- Those yachts aren't going to buy themselves, you know!
- I think about them all the time actually...
- It'd be just awful if they lost all but a small fraction of a percent of their wealth and were left as mere mu- hurk!
  Excuse me, had to vomit at the idea. Just have to rip the band-aid off fast and say it: multimillionaires. Ugh, now I have to go lie down.

The less organized and fragmented the populous, the easier it is for the rich to take advantage of us.

the second step is realizing it isn't going to change, at least not any time soon
No, I will never have this attitude. I refuse to believe that we couldn't at any moment choose to change our course. The rich and powerful fear it. Believing things won't change, sooner or later, only benefits them and not us. There is no magical right time for change, there's only now.
- Look at game theory. We have 300m+ Americans operating primarily out of their own self-protection. They're lied to about what that means. They are divided beyond repair.
  3% of the US population protested in July, that wasn't enough. What would be enough for a revolution you think? How would that go?
  
  Look at history
  Edit: apologies for the snarky and unproductive comment, I was hungry.
  What I meant is that one of the wonders of the modern propaganda system is making you see everything through the lens of "the system". If you want to know how oppressive regimes can be overturned, simply look at how it was done before. The French, Russian, American revolutions. Spoiler: it was never pretty.
- All this effort of divide and conquer, trying to keep people in a state of fear and panic, etc. kinda shows what they are afraid of.
  https://streamable.com/e/1w3otk
- I can believe things could change any day. Everyone in every country is sick and tired of the rich monkeys in charge. It's a coordination problem, nothing more nothing less.

Don't worry, we make up for it by having plenty of bad reasons to keep homelessness and poverty from being solved.

Homelessness is a dynamic issue that doesn’t just involve available housing and food. I worked with that population for four years and the causes are drug use, mental illness, escaping abuse, poverty lack of access to banking, mail, showers, secure storage.. etc and etc.
I will blow your mind how not having somewhere to store crucial documents and having a secure mailbox can fuck you up.

Rich want to be richer. Isn't that a good enough reason?
Fuckin' socialists, putting the right of poor children to go to school above the right of billionaires to buy another mega yacht.

Reagan pretty much shut down progressivism in the eighties and its only in the new millenium we have seen it come back to a level it could be implemented again. We would be in much better shape if we did not have reaganomics that looked better than it was due to the energy crises no longer being a thing.

Depends on whether you see the primary function of houses as housing people, or as providing their owners with a competitive return on investment.
We can’t do both at once.

Chat Pile - Why

There is a reason, well, at least two reasons. First is greed the second is the greedy ones also enjoy the cruelty.
- If not the cruelty they are often convinced (or have convinced themselves) that poverty is deserved, like their opulence is.
  Just today there was a post on how most Americans believe poverty is the result of individual choices.

It's because guaranteeing positive rights requires cooperation or coercion. And it turns out we're not great at cooperation.
- It turns out capitalism actively disincentives cooperation. Cooperation is how humanity became the dominant life form. We’re fucking great at it when we don’t have a bunch of leeches siphoning off our surplus value and using that wealth to turn us against each other.
  
  At a small scale, sure. When you reach the size of a country, not so much.
- It also requires empathy over group belonging

Yes this is the world. It fucked and we hope to change it. Even thought you were stoned it makes sense. Feel and house people
- I'd prefer to feed them but I'm sure we can find volunteers to feel them too.

There's a reason they call it the tragedy of the commons.
Edit: The full paper is available online if anyone is interested. Here's a copy from a university in Michigan. https://pages.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hardin%201968.pdf
- Never seen Wikipedia article shill capitalist propaganda this hard...
  Jfc
  
  The fuck you on about?
  The Wikipedia article starts with two paragraphs accurately defining the term, then in the third paragraph above the drop-downs mentions the criticisms. Then two drop-down sections, Solutions and Criticisms, are almost entirely given over to all the ways various people have refuted this.
  What do you want, a big flashing red banner at the top that says "This Concept is Bullshit"? I don't think you understand how Wikipedia works.
  
  The paper this article talks about was authored by an evolutionary biologist that wanted to talk about environmental science problems and social responsibility. Ignoring the concepts of personal property and ownership and stuff, think about this for a minute. 81% of Americans own a yard, but how many of them do you see growing crops in that space? How much more effectively COULD that land be utilized towards the common good if it were managed in some way? Or from the other side: the Alaskan government had to step in and put a halt on Bering Sea crab harvests for a few years because the numbers were critically low. Do you think all of the individual fishermen who are reliant on that income would have voluntarily stopped? Would they even have known the crab population was dwindling?
  
  I can see thinking the tragedy of the commons is capitalist propaganda if you think there is a hard line between people and corporations.
  The North Sea fishing industry didn't collapse because too many of the proletariat wanted to do a lot of fishing, it collapsed because thousands of people organized into dozens of groups that systematically overstrained the ecosystem. Because those groups wanted to make more profit for a small group of hundreds of people. Everyone involved was acting in their rational best interest with no oversight or regulation guarding the big picture view and it caused everyone involved to destroy their livelihoods. Other than the ones at the top who's livelihood is/was consolidating profit of course.
  The tragedy of the commons isn't about how it's an individual's fault or responsibility. It's about how larger groups need disinterested guardrails for long term higher quality of life.

But a lot of dumb reasons!

The world is how it is until it doesn't matter. Suffering is only temporary. Enjoy the time that you have. Can't take anything with you.
- Then explain the tombs of Egyptian Pharoahs?
  
  They thought you could take it with you. But they were wrong
- Take anything with you where? Dead is dead, and there's nothing after.
  
  My point, exactly. No point in hoarding.

I've got a reason for you: it's profitable for there to be some scarcity.

The concentration isn't arbitrary.

This is how it’s always been. Nothing new.

The dark secret about money is that it only works when there isn't enough for everyone. An indigent population is built in to capitalism. If you gave everyone $1,000,000 the value of a million dollars willing crash. If everyone owned a house real estate values would plummet.
- Absolutely. Most people being low on money is essential to making the system work.
  Otherwise, no one would take terrible low-paying jobs that pay for billionaires' lavish lifestyles.
  And so is the real estate market. Any excess of money you get sinks into having a place to live. Once population overall earns more, housing prices skyrocket. It's an ingenious trap to keep us eternally broke and powerless, while feeding the rich.
  There's no market-based solution for this. We need a serious intervention. As long as we don't put the working majority first, unsurprisingly, the world is gonna suck.
- If everyone owned a house real estate values would plummet.
  If e.g. macroeconomics are working against human interest, it can fuck off. Real estate does not have to be something speculative – dominated by forces such as private equity and landlords.
  Housing and property are a right and it would serve us to act like it. Houses are for people, not for banks and other faceless entities to hoard and restrict.
  If you gave everyone $1,000,000 the value of a million dollars willing crash.
  If you gave everybody a million dollars to be used to better their lives, their community, and society at large - let the value of the dollar crash in the lens of the old ways.
  Incentivizing positive action is beneficial for everyone, as long as we don't build a house of cards and we consider those around us, as well as the planet.
  Incentivizing wealth hoarding, ruthlessness, systemic exploitation, infinite growth, unlimited greed, the monopolization of resources, and the consolidation of power is only beneficial for those at the top of the food chain – it creates vast, untold amounts of suffering and is destroying the planet.
  The dark secret about money is that it only works when there have enough for everyone.
  Money is a distortion of value. People don't need to be valuable to the most greedy of us to deserve to live and be provided what they need to live.
  Monopolization, market dominance, and governments that don't represent the people have gotten us to where we are: individuals, communities, and societies of people powerless to affect society or the world in any meaningful way, because of "the economy" and "the cost" – it's all bullshit.
  
  I think you two are actually on the same page, in that capitalism strives on inequality and dependence
  The original comment was not advocating for capitalism and the old ways, it was just saying that making us poor is essential to keep capitalism running.
  
  In a way the guy before you is right: Some things would crash. For example, if everyone has a million, people wouldn't be forced to do horrendous things for no pay. For example, nobody would work at a brothel, sell drugs or work as a modern slave picking fruit on a field. If people would do these jobs, they'd only do that for much, much more money.
  But these things are things that only exist (at that price point) because enough people are currently desperate enough to be exploitable. In a somewhat just system, these kinds of exploitation shouldn't be possible.

106 comments