More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.
They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.
Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.
According to the article, this thing is entirely funded by private donations. Apart from the most reactionary right wing edgelords, I’ve yet to see any conservatives argue against charity. Most just don’t want to be FORCED to pay for others via increased taxes, but they’re happy to give when it’s voluntary.
I’m calling bs
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/01/20/freeze-winter-storm-midwest-cold-deaths-homeless/72269446007/
They absolutely argue against charity if said charity benefits those they don’t like.
Yeah, that sounds shitty, but what the article doesn’t mention, despite being literally in the first paragraph of the press release that was linked, is that the real problem wasn’t the zoning law violation, but the fact that the police department had received multiple calls for various crimes being committed there, including theft, harassment, drug overdose, and sexual assault. It also mentions various fire code violations involving the electrical supply, people cooking in non-ventilated rooms, etc.
It appears that the use of zoning laws violation to put an end to it was just a convenient excuse, but the author “forgot” to mention that in order to paint the city government in a bad light.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/colorado/news/rock-church-lawsuit-colorado-free-exercise-religion-burdened-castle-rock-homeless/
Here’s another one. There are cases of places banning charity all over the place. Hell, you can’t give out bottles of water to people stuck in line outside in Georgia if they happen to be voting. They cut social programs and claim churches/charities will pick up the slack, and then attack said churches/charities.
My point is here that conservatives will simply attack anything they feel is in their way. They simply want control. They want homeless people to be homeless because “they deserve to be homeless”. They have absolutely no problem attacking charitable efforts, even if it has no impact on them whatsoever. They want to maintain the social hierarchy they feel should be in place.
Hayek just hated homeless people?
Have you read any of his books or delved into that side seriously at all, or is this a hunch?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Colorado is a firmly blue state these days. Doesn’t mean the town can’t have a Republican mayor (I’m sure some still do), but unfortunately the city website doesn’t mention his party affiliation.
Douglas County is a Republican area in Colorado. In between the very red area of Colorado Springs and blue Denver. These are conservative policies.
Is your contention that conservatives aren’t doing these things? They literally voted down the bill that cut child poverty in half. What the hell are we arguing about here?
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t provide any further sources about the incident, so we have to trust the author to not have omitted any inconvenient facts in order to sell a story. Which, after seeing the details on the previous one, I’m not willing to do.
The devil is unfortunately always in the details, so I don’t feel comfortable making a judgment in this case. I do think it’s important to help people get back on their feet, and I appreciate these pastors’ willingness to help, but it has to be done in a way that doesn’t put an excessive burden on the community as a whole by creating safety hazards for other people.
Great start! Before continuing the rest of your sentence, please back up two commas and ask the question “where did our society fail in supporting this person to cause them to fall?” But the devil’s after that second comma, because
A community in a society concerned about supporting these people from the beginning, not just trying to fix the most visible symptom, would not see the presence of a fellow human being as a ‘safety hazard’ or ‘burden’ but would rightly see it as a failure of their society to take care of the vulnerable.
That’s a good question, and I won’t pretend I know the answer because it’s likely multi-faceted, but it likely already starts in childhood, with parents neglecting and/or mistreating their children, causing them to grow up anxious and socially maladjusted. Children who were loved and cared for and properly socialized rarely end up struggling too much as adults, because they have strong bonds within their community. If they happen to fall on hard times (like losing a job or getting injured or severely ill), they have a network of friends to fall back on, which makes the recovery process much easier.
But without any of these, things can quickly spiral out of control. You lose your job, start drinking out of loneliness and frustration, get behind on rent, lose your apartment, or get involved with drugs and so on. However, I’m not really sure how throwing more money at people like that would help fix this. It might help them keep their apartment and avoid becoming homeless, but it probably won’t make them stop drinking. It just hides the problem instead of addressing it.
Now I’m fully aware that the current model of just letting them slide into homelessness and despair until they become a public nuisance, or worse, a criminal, and then putting them in jail doesn’t really work all that well, although I have heard many stories of people for whom this was the wakeup moment they needed to start taking responsibility for themselves and turn their lives around. However, that still seems to be a tiny percentage.
Perhaps if more effort was being made to prevent all this, it could save a few more lives, but we already have things like CPS to address childhood abuse, it’s just that crazy parents will do their damndest to avoid having them get involved. Social workers might also help, but that requires these people to be willing to accept help, which many are not. But one thing I’m pretty certain about, and that’s if you give irresponsible people more money, they’re not just magically going to become responsible. They’re just going to fritter it away on drugs and booze and then come back asking for more money.
You’re “forced” to pay taxes for the stability it provides the entire community.
Here’s a great study on what causes crime:
https://sentencing.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/sentencingnvgov/content/Meetings/2022/08.24.22 NSC Mtg. Agenda Item 8 PFJ What Really Lowers Crime.pdf
Overwhelmingly most crime and violence in a community is related to the ability it’s people have to earn income, housing, and healthcare. The very things our taxes are supposed to provide a security net for.
The taxes “forced” on you, to a point, are necessary for the stability of our communities. And the reason that stability is fading in most American cities isn’t becuase of illegals, it’s because of conservatives lowering and diverting tax revenues away from the social programs necessary to minimize crime. (Because those programs are “socialism.”) Also conservatives fighting to never raise the minimum wage for a generation of Americans. What are the conservative policies on housing again? Oh yeah, people now have to compete with corporations to get them, so prices will never lower.
People are generally happy to pay taxes towards social safety nets when they understand the basic economics of the security it provides. Especially when there is a scientifically proven increase in violence and crime that comes from the erosion of that security.
If you feel “forced” to provide basic economic security to other Americans for the benefit of your entire community, and it’s safety - then you don’t have to look far to find a conservative who is against charity. Just look in a mirror.
We’ve been saying this for many years. It seems we have fostered a society that isn’t really interested in victim reduction as it is in vengeance. Only have to look at some of the countries with low recidivism rates.
I’ve always found that logic weird on their part.
If I am planning to do it anyway, because I recognize it is the right thing to do, what difference does it make if there are laws in place to ensure the less ethical among us do it as well?
Because it doesn’t feel like a charitable deed when the money is taken from you by force.
This is like arguing for people to be allowed to rob you at gunpoint as long as they have a family to feed.
If you have more money than you could spend in a lifetime yes, you should be robbed at gunpoint to feed family’s.
And now you know why most conservatives are armed to the teeth. It’s to protect themselves from people like you.
See, the thing about charity is that when it’s done correctly, it helps both, the giver and the receiver. The receiver feels good because their needs have been met, and the giver feels good for having done a good deed. As soon as you put a gun into the equation, that all goes out of the window, and it becomes a win-lose situation. Only one person is going to walk away satisfied, and the other might end up dead.
And if you think that’s not a big loss because you hated them anyway, consider that one day, it’ll be you.
Yes yes someday all the money will trickle down on me and it’ll be my turn to be rich and then I’ll get angry when my “all” my wealth is taken away from me and I’m just well off. They might as well murder me at that point I mean sheesh
Imagine going from upper class to just upper class. The horror!!!
Why would you want to get rich in the first place if you believe that it’s more important to feed the poor? You’d be no better than the people you profess to hate, and you could easily avoid getting robbed by just donating anything you don’t need to charity.
Bro that’s crazy has it crossed your mind that I don’t want to be rich? Put me in that position and I’d be paying for ads and shit to get the government to tax people like me more.
Your not gonna catch me on any of that “Oh so you think wealthy people shouldn’t exist” bs either btw. In a vacuum I think people should be able to make a lot of money from stuff they do but billionaires shouldn’t exist full stop. The amount of good you can do with merely one billion dollars is genuinely kind of inconceivable and we have multiple multi-billionaires, and not anywhere close to enough good being done by them. They simply shouldn’t exist. They’ll be just as happy being multimillionaires though I’d quite like taxes to dramatically ramp up once your in the 10 millions, even that is far above where middle class is meant to be.
Why on earth would you do that when you could just skip the middle men and give the money directly to the poor? That seems a lot more efficient.
This is a flawed analogy, if Tax’s are the equivalent of being robbed at gun point, the real question is, would you rather be robbed by someone trying to feed their family or robbed by someone just adding to their pile of money. You’re getting taxed no matter what, ideally I would prefer that money go to help people.
The problem with taxes is that a rather large chunk of it just goes to the military industrial complex and other wasteful government spending, and very little of it actually ends up helping to feed the poor. If you donate to charity directly, there’s a much better chance that most of the money goes to actual people in need instead of the pockets of corrupt politicians.
I agree there, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that charities don’t generally do good work. I don’t want to see what little of that chunk of taxes that do go to helping people be cut away leaving only more of taxes to go in to the MIC, corruption and waste.
Conservatives have no real value system beyond “what is good for me right now?”. They like or dislike things for transient, emotional, reasons. They might be in favor of charity when it’s doing something they personally benefit from, but that’s about as far as their reasoning goes.
IDK, arguing that homeless people should be allowed to stay somewhere despite committing multiple crimes and posing a fire safety hazard doesn’t exactly strike me as the opposite of a “what is good for me right now?” kinda mindset.
Hating on weak people feels good to them, maybe?
You tell me. If conservatives really are as greedy and selfish as you say, is that not also a form of weakness masquerading as strength? How are you any better if you hate them for that?
what?
I’m better than them because I’m not trying to overthrow the government to install a dictatorship that protects my in-group (eg: straight white people) and binds my out-group. I’m not trying to destroy the environment, murder the queers, ban books, ban vaccines, either.
But you’re still advocating for the murder of an out-group (i.e. conservatives). You’re also just shifting the blame to someone else, which is exactly what you’re accusing THEM of.
Doctors cut people up just like serial killers. They’re basically the same.
No, because their intention is different.
You’re not trying to cure conservatives of their hard-heartedness, you’re threatening to punish them for it.