There are good charities doing really basic and cost effective things such as worming and sites like GiveWell. There's also the question of how does this coffee company decide who they buy off and hence who gets paid an above average amount? That's its own form of charity.
Which is a good reason in itself for me to continue doing what I do. Are you criticising my attempt to pay a farmer a fair price for his crop? Seriously? OK then. Let's exploit Third World farmers mercilessly. Let's totally exploit them. Let's drive them into destitution by buying only at the very lowest price. But that's OK, because we can then give more money to charity, which can give hand-outs to the poor people that we exploited into destitution. Dude, your reasoning is messed up.
Did you look at some of the givewell stuff. There are quality of life years estimations for some programs of $50 (speculative ones but even if out by a factor of ten). I'm suggesting such charity might be FAR more impactful than higher wages for select few farmers. That seem like perfectly clear, logical reasoning to me.
Having thought about it, and having had the requisite couple of drinks required for topics like this [religion or politics and imo this is the latter]... I have no issue with those with money having money, even the ones who arguably have more than can possibly do anything with... The problem comes from the 'let them eat cake' type attitude a lot of them seem to have... Where you have a person who can piss half their assets up against the wall and still never have to worry about money, telling those without [or at least vastly less] what they should do with it, or worse that they're unworthy of having what they *do* have and should roll over accept their lot and be happy about it... It's why many many people take exception to Iain and/or Duncan Smith, a well-off chap who reportedly spent £40 just on a breakfast [whether he paid for it himself or it was on expenses], implying some poor sod who's had the misfortune of being laid off is lazy, feckless and is unworthy of the £75 a week [iirc] payment he gets in unemployment pay. As for charity, i don't give to charity for many of the reasons Nexxo lists, I probably wouldn't trust nexxos bag of coffee either tbh for many of the same reasons, however noble it's aims.
The 'let them eat cake' type attitude would be an improvement IMHO, a study from Princeton University in which MRI scans were taken of several university students’ active brains while they viewed images of different people found that photographs of homeless people and drug addicts failed to stimulate areas of the brain that usually activate whenever people think about other people, or themselves. Instead, the (mostly affluent) students reacted to the images as if they “had stumbled on a pile of trash”. But just think of all the people that have a job making his £40 breakfast.
Sorry, excluding ISAs, isn't that the case already? If not I have been giving a few unnecessary gifts to the tax man all these years. You would then need to also confiscate their passports.
Doesn't to me. My individual £5,-- contribution is not going to somehow benefit more people through a charity than if I give it directly to a farmer. Charities make an impact through combining the contributions of many. Similarly if all us coffee drinkers started paying fair trade prices for coffee, all coffee farmers would benefit, and that wealth would trickle up. And then they wouldn't need our charity handouts. Charity is a remedy for the failure of society. I would rather fix the root cause than treat the symptoms.
I think one of the root causes for this is how knowledge is stuck in a few hands, in other words, all the restrictions around intellectual property. If research and production were inherently shared and distributed, half of those symptoms wouldn't exist.
I largely agree with the gist of what you are saying. But quite simply it would take every country in the world to co-operate. Even if there was a large majority of countries that implemented high tax for corporations and super rich, there would always be a few that see the benefit of being a haven. By the same note my job is almost entirely dependent on large multi-nationals taking advantage of preferential tax arrangements here. If tax were increased for these companies they would just jump to the next place where they can save on the tax bill. Leaving my (and many others) job prospects fairly diminished.
Indeed, and even research is absurdly expensive because it is riddled with patents and done behind closed doors. The difference between the cost of production and final price of many products is ridiculous.
In addition to the things you mentioned, working full time should also leave you with enough to raise at least one child imo.
Here's an argument against the super rich - they f*** up our society by trying to mold it through their very narrow views and values of what people are and should be and what life is and should be. By setting up or corrupting institutions to work in their favour and not for the people it was set up for, they undermine society as a whole. That means undermining your and my life. Most of them only pay lip service to their hyper-individualist values of relying upon themselves, etc etc. But when **** really hits the fan, they depend on the societal institutions to save them, their work and their wealth. For example, they preach taking responsibility for their own actions yet have you EVER seen any superrich person pay up themselves or via their business for the true cost of a **** up like an oil spill or a financial crisis. Also, where do you think they get all that money from? Do you really think they work for it all on their own? NO! Society and its structures helps them to create the profit. Worst of all, when trying to change society for the better FOR ALL(including them), they actively interfere to hamper the process. In my opinion, the concept of being superrich simply needs to be driven out of society like racism,sexism,murder,etc. Not on the basis of anything else but their proven history of actively trying to **** society up. As Kim Stanley Robinson(a prominent American sc-fi writer) says, capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism. So why still allow for feudal lords to be created. "That is what capitalism is—a version in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work." - Green Mars
Your decisions in life, your parents support, your other relatives support, your friends and colleagues support, your life experiences, your education, your drive and commitment, your want for a better life for yourself and your families, your will to dedicate a large part of your life to a career ...and to climbing the ladders and running the rat races ... going from a hard working but largely unmotivated worker (thats me) to a leader ... then a leader of leaders ... It all adds up to whether you, and/or your children, and/or their children, and/or their children, will become rich. Defining what makes someone rich is debateable. At the start of this thread I felt poor, at this stage I now feel a lot richer. All that has changed is my attitude.
How can you completely, absolutely ignore whether the societal environment and institutional structures even allow for all that you have mentioned above and to what degree? I really hope you haven't internalised the 'everything is mine and only my fault' narrative.
You can add those to the end of the list. I know people that have grown from nothing, to what some of you are calling rich. Not super rich. What some are suggesting as unobtainable, actually just requires a slight change from "can't do" ... to "can do". Law of attraction type of voodoo magic unicorn dust miracle stuff.
I would say people that have grown from nothing, to what some are calling rich are the exceptions and not the rule though, for every nobody made good how many people don't?
