Human productivity has exponentially increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution. We produce far more food and clothing than can be consumed and there are more than enough homes for people to live in. Generic medicine can often be produced for pennies.
There is no reason that we as a society cannot guarantee at least a basic standard of living consisting of sustenance, a safe place to rest and relax, treatment for common ailments, etc.
Still, there are farmers working to produce that food, using fuel, hiring mechanics, etc. Literally millions of people are involved in the research needed to make insulin so efficiently. Millions more are currently involved into making AIDS, Cancer and other diseases less fatal. And obviously homes don’t grow on trees, from raw materials to specialized geologic knowledge, lots of people have to work very hard to build (and maintain) a home that is safe and pleasant.
That’s being said, many countries do guarantee all of that. Capitalist countries, before lemmings jump out with bullshit.
In Germany even if you are unemployed you get your health insurance paid for, your rent covered - up to centra in surface area depending on the family size - utilities paid for, and a certain amount of cash for groceries and basic needs. The only condition is you have to be looking for a job and accept any reasonable offer - and make a good faith effort to keep it. Sometimes the government will ask you to work for them (usually unskilled laborike cleaning parks or something like that).
I mean, you picked like one of the handful of socialist market economies that does that.
Canada nominally provides you with money in the form of social assistance if you’re unemployed. It’s not enough to pay for rent on a studio apartment. Let alone food.
The point is that being alive is not a voluntary contract. We don’t ask to be born, and we are continually told by society that suicide is unacceptable. This is fine, I think that it’s generally a good idea to promote being alive. But capitalism has actually decided that being alive is only half of it. You can’t kill yourself, but you can’t exist if you’re not useful to the capitalist system either.
So basically if you’re mentally ill, if you’re disabled in any way, if like me you have medical conditions that make routine employment significantly harder than it is for people without these conditions - you’re just screwed. Here’s your 600$ a month social assistance check. Rent is 1000$ on the absolute most basic apartment in your area. Bare minimum groceries for a single person are close to 300 a month. You might be able to afford to live in a multi bedroom dwelling with strangers without central heating and lead plumbing that often doesn’t work. At that point, your best bet to eat is at food banks, which are overcrowded and underfunded. Every single person, company, and political group across the entire country will demonize you as being essentially worthless and openly talk about how you should be forced to output labor that you are unable to output.
All this while like 10% of apartments sit empty, we throw out like 30% of the food we produce, and most labor in society has become about capitalist maintenance (office job, desk job, working for companies that essentially do nothing to feed or house people, that produce unnecessary goods in mass quantities for profit motives). Like capitalism has openly determined that we are worthless. We’re worth less than garbage. They’d rather throw food away than feed us. They’d rather leave perfectly functional working apartments empty than give us homes. Capitalism has no use for people who cannot produce capital. This isn’t new, and it is a fundamental aspect of the system. They call it merit. How much merit do you have? How much do you deserve to be alive and be happy?
And I work 40 hours a week and have for years. I take medications that make that possible, and I’m very lucky that medications exist that can essentially make me compatible with the capitalist labor system. But I lived that life before, and have many friends who still do. Barely surviving because society has decided that it’s not worth it for them to live.
Not everyone can output labor. The point of society should be to ensure that all members of society can live healthy safe and happy lives. There is no reason this cannot be the case. It has just been decided by those with majority power that it shouldn’t be the case. Suffering is legally mandated.
Seems like a Canada problem, not a capitalism problem. Germany is a capitalist country where things are kind of okay. France is a capitalist country and they banned throwing away food that’s is still edible. Many countries tax residential properties that are empty, encouraging renting or selling them and fueling supply. There are easy and straightforward solutions to all of those problems. You just need to vote for people willing to implement them.
And those are not tax havens or microstates, BTW. I’m talking about countries with 50+ Million people, a lot of immigration, and not even a lot of natural resources. For countries with oil look what Norway is doing. Also capitalist, BTW.
Yeah, I specified in the first line that Germany is a socialist market economy. As are the Scandinavian countries to varying degrees. Those are not features of capitalism. Those are features of those specific countries. You could do away with market capitalism and still not throw away food, or leaving residential properties empty. Free market capitalism actually dictates that food and housing are private industries that should be controlled by private interests with little (or no) government oversight. Socialism is what says that those thing should be government regulated and that measures should be taken to ensure everyone has access to food and shelter.
The socialist market economy is not the same thing as a capitalist free market. To be clear, I also believe that a socialist market is insufficient. Simply taking half or quarter measures to ensure people don’t starve to death and have homes isn’t enough either. A modest step in the right direction, but not what the end goal should be.
It is an economy centered around capital, so a capitalist economy.
And nobody is talking about half homes. You get something like 50m2 for the first person and 20m2 for each subsequent family member.
That is not what capitalism is lol
I said half measure not half homes. They could just, you know, provide homeless people with homes. Taxing property owners for not renting properties is doing pretty well nothing for people who are homeless and half no income. Over half a million Germans are homeless.
Edit: I see where the half home confusion is coming from, that was a typo meant to say “have homes”.
That’s the definition of capitalism.
We carve our living out of an uncaring and hostile universe.
Earning a living means doing your share of that.
Yep. It’s amazing how many people think all this should be handed to them. If everyone thought that no one would have anything.
There’s a certain balance we’ve yet to strike. Not necessarily having a living handed to you, but being in a situation where if a rough couple weeks knocks you out on your ass, you can meet your basic needs while you get back up on your feet.
We have tons of systems like this. The simplest example is that people can borrow money and pay it back later. We extend this option to people, without the government forcing us to at all, but we don’t do it when people are unlikely to be back on their feet after two weeks.
In terms of straight-up gifts, our society is absolutely full of that. On at least ten occasions I’ve lacked the ability to keep going, and have been given resources by public institutions, private institutions, and individuals.
The generosity of our society is off the charts. That’s why people don’t starve here.
