Re: What's Going on in Eurafrica?
Reply #33 –
@jax: Is your home, your house, open to all and any, at any hour? But perhaps you've never had one...
I'd appreciate it if you'd resume your Charity vs. Government Subsidy thread! It would be enlightening.
I have several homes. Here is a curio from my latest, Södertälje:
Drowning for Hope -- On Their Way to Sweden, Södertälje for Any PriceIt is April 26. One hundred years and two days have passed since the leaders of the Ottoman Empire decided that all Christians would be exterminated. My family originates from Midyat in Turabdin (Mountain of Worshippers), known for the world's densest concentration of church and monasteries. My ancestors were butchered during extremely dramatic circumstances and only a few children survived -- they were my grandparents. Stories of rape, abduction and eradication attempts abound.
My mom and I are in the car on the way to the Syriac Orthodox Church to attend a memorial service for those victims of the genocide in 1915. In the same church there are also other activities going on. Some relatives are there to pray for and remember their uncles, who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they were heading to Sweden.
"Stop, she looks lost, she must be heading for the church." Mom has caught sight of a woman who is dressed in black, just as we are. I wind down the car window. It is true, she was heading for the church as well.
She says she came to Sweden -- and freedom -- just three weeks ago. She paid smugglers 13,000 Euro for the trip. She coughs and looks rough. She caught chronic bronchitis during the boat trip between Turkey and Greece. She was also suffocated in a truck packed with refugees. Two women in the truck died.
"Sweden should take the money, get paid to pick us up, and let us in. Then we would avoid paying cynical smugglers, criminals who do not care about human life."
If you are feeling nostalgic,
the original thread on charity is here.
Raw capitalism essentially functions on the principle that "the consumer is always right", by prioritising consumer choice over supplier convenience. This means that resources will naturally flow to where the price is highest.
State capitalism and regulation is based on the principle of common good, that there are resources that can be better governed by dedicated people than by consumer choice alone, in the communist form "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".
Of course there is a lot more to be said about the two than the above, but that should be the gist of it, and that there have never been a pure capitalist system that has lasted long without governance, and no state system that has lasted long without reintroducing some measure of capitalism. The shortcomings and weaknesses of either system should also be well enough known.
Charity has none of the benefit and most of the shortcomings of both, and adding peculiar some maladies of their own. Its reason for existence is that there are needs that neither the private nor the public sector has been able to cover, making charity "economic activity of the gaps". The natural approach then would be to find ways to fill those gaps rather than praise charity.
Let's imagine you were narcoleptically destitute, that Frenzie decided to start a charity to alleviate the destruction wrecked by this overlooked ailment, and I were the major donor.
I became dedicated to this cause after my beloved grand-aunt destroyed herself and her family in a freak narcoleptic attack. Just before that she had thrown away the
green trousers she always wore, and I have become convinced that this very action was the cause of this calamity. Thus my one requirement for Frenzie giving you sorely needed aid is that you always will wear
green trousers, as a prophylactic mind you.
Frenzie, being a rational fellow, will know that this is nonsense, but it is something he will have to put up with, as he can do narcoleptic good with my money, and after all, wearing
green trousers doesn't
hurt (much).
If he managed to secure funding without having to cater the vagaries of us donors, he would operate pretty much like a government agency. It would still be no guarantee that what he did would benefit the sufferers, let alone optimise those benefits, but at least his focus would no longer be the donors, but the sufferers.