this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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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.
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.