I think a lot of it is the disconnect that happens when you've been well taken care of all your life. If you had to work in school, and then apply for jobs, and then had to show up and do the work, but it was all pretty much straightforward and fair, then it's easy to think that if someone doesn't have enough money to live they probably just aren't doing those easy life things and it's their fault and nothing needs to change.
If you've had experience on the unfair side, it looks totally different.
Yeah this is true, but also money is made up? Like all animals just go in and eat food, and they will regularly do so on farms, but only humans get punished for it. Humans get kept away from food which they need to survive for purely social reasons.
Like imagine an alien looking down on us and for them money is totally arbitrary and they're all "wait what are those humans even doing? Like there's food right there and they are stopping the hungry humans from eating it, but they don't seem to mind as much when it's other animals...
So for me, the really screwed up thing about statements about money is that a bunch of people have just... forgotten? that money is made up? Like the old statement "people can sooner imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
Well, but, there's a reason societies that made up money did better than societies that didn't. I do actually think there's a perfectly valid point on the "other side," that it's not a good thing for society if people can just sit around and expect others to take care of everything for them food and shelter wise. There's an inherent justice in the concept that if the economic conditions are such that you can get decently-rewarding useful work and make a living at it if you decide to, you can kind of assume that if someone's struggling financially it's their own fault. Because that does happen sometimes.
But that's not at all the current economic climate. A lot of the rich people don't really do that much useful, if anything. A lot of the poor people work their asses off and they're still struggling for basic necessities. As technology's gotten more capable, what we should have done is make sure that the opportunities that are available are aligned with work that still really needs to happen: Science, art, working on important problems. The stuff that can't be automated -- construction, transport, a lot of physical jobs -- should pay well and wind up being a realistic way to ensure a good life and good retirement once you can't do it any more. Basically, the world should have justice; to me I don't think that should mean necessarily an escape from the "you gotta have a job" system, because (a) I don't think that's good for you, if the job that you're replacing "nothing" with is a good one (b) automation or no we're sure as shit not yet at a point where all the important things that need to get solved or worked on are solved.
Instead of doing all that, we just built a more efficient system for exploiting and grinding people down, committed ourselves to making the biosphere unlivable in 50 or 100 years, and worked hard on putting up systems to make it difficult for any of that system to change.
Hooray
An upvote isn't enough for this one
From a purely selfish perspective, starving people are fucking dangerous.
It's in everyone's best interest that society ensures everyone has enough. Otherwise people are going to do what it takes to survive
This is what I always think about when lawmakers take punitive measures against homelessness and drug addiction, or higher theft/property crimes, as though it isn't abundantly clear why all of those things have increased.
San Francisco wants to drug test people applying for welfare
Under capitalism, food isn't produced to eat but to make profits. When it's not profitable to sell, they would rather dump foods, starving the people than to plainly donate.
We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates.
Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
Under capitalism, food isn't produced to eat but to make profits.
A third of all food produced in the United States is wasted. A third. We could feed another 200 million people in this country if we stopped doing absolute bullshit like stocking produce and bakery shelves far above expected demand so the shelves always look full, or paying dairy farmers to pour out their milk so the price stays high.
I mean, I'm vegan, I want the dairy industry to roll over and die anyway, but the fact that lobbyists have set up a subsidy system so fundamentally broken that it pays dairy farmers to dump milk instead of sell it - so they not only torture animals for literally no benefit to anyone at all but also throw away calories while people starve - it's just infuriating.
There's a famous scene in The Grapes of Wrath about how, while people starved during the Great Depression, crops throughout America were burned and poisoned and destroyed so that food prices would stay high. And as crops fail with climate change and desperate refugees come to America by the millions we're going to see those days again.
American capitalism barely survived the first Great Depression it caused. And I pray to whatever God is listening that something better than capitalism comes out of the next.
Same goes for people freezing to death in the cold, when there is plenty of housing for everyone.
There are people who think children should be responsible for paying for their own food. It's despicable.
Good thing we don't actually have a problem with people starving to death in our society then.
https://frac.org/hunger-poverty-america
If you say "well, not many people are really starving, if people just have to skip meals or suffer from malnutrition that doesn't count", congratulations, you're part of the problem.
The United States has so much food that no one should be going hungry.
Frankly, the world has so much food that no one in it should be going hungry, but the United States specifically doesn't have the excuse of civil war or crop failures or complete government dysfunction. We let our children go hungry from capitalism and spite.
