How To Fix Poverty: Why Not Just Give People Money?

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We do it to the other animals to minimize suffering.

How odd that I was in retail for 23 years and never realized that. How could I have missed it?

If the rich just want slaves, there is no use for a global population growing over 8 billion. They might as well gas the majority of us useless eaters. I would guess the more expensive "first world" useless eaters will be the first to go.

If one is poor when one smokes and drinks, one probably isn't going to be significantly less poor if one gave up smoking and drinking. They may have more for food or basic necessities, but cigarettes and most alcoholic beverages are novelty items, the expenses of which would not greatly impact a financially health person.

If we want to minimize suffering, we should end neo-colonialism.

That's the problem.

The people with power set the morality, and most people are just followers.

Less food isn't going to stop reproduction, it usually means less to go around for everyone or starvation. In rough areas (i.e. those with war and famine) people actually produce more children than less, that's a biological instinct: less means it's tougher to survive, therefore to ensure the next generation you need to reproduce more, in essence sexually reproducing creatures in extreme circumstances go by quantity rather than quality.

Usually "starvation" means the end of life, consequently, "less reproduction".

That's one of the reasons why zoologists promote this method.

"Providing an artificial food source causes adults to produce large families which the natural food supply can’t support. Overpopulation can lead to starvation and epidemics of disease, some of which are dangerous to humans".
http://www.spcamc.org/wildlife/eight-go ... -wildlife/


Like Syria, Afganistan, Iraq? What war-zone are are you talking about, where strife makes people have more kids? As far as I can tell, they flee those areas.

WIKI 2013 Fertility Rates based on "CIA WORLD Factbook"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

The very same right wingers who say, "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em," are usually the same people who call birth control murder.

Are you saying humans in general are animals? Or just that poor people are animals? Because either way, that flies in the face of all human beings having inalienable rights, which is the foundation of modern western civilization. Just because we are anatomically animals doesn't mean that makes us of less worth, even among the poorest of us.

I have to ask, would this come as a lump sum or a basic income? If am lump sum, then we need only to look at the plight of most lottery winners and high end athletes (to be fair, not all go broke) to see what would happen. Giving someone quite a huge sum of money who has never had that amount of money without good assistance will result in the person ending up in poverty again and quite possibly put the person is a worse position than if they were never given the money at all.

Basic income might work better. The issue then is, with no incentive to work, what does the government do? So far, the only incentives for work I have seen are either money or guns. There a jobs that need to be done that people simply do not want to do and unless there is an incentive to do those jobs, they will not get done. I know this sounds cold but it is the truth.

I think a better strategy would be to try to figure out the reasons poverty exists and go after those. Quite a bit of it is discrimination - against unwed, single, and teenage mothers, against those of a minority race, against women, against those with disabilities, against those with criminal records, etc. We also need to find a way to educate people better, especially those who have less of an ability to pay for it. However, I doubt the powers that be will really want to solve these problems.

Funny, here's the actual chart from the actual CIA WORLD Factbook, not Wikipedia, and it looks nothing like the data you're showing, and backs up my claim:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2054rank.html

You have just broadcast to the world that you did not read the article I posted. Don't ya love it when people start flapping their mouths about a thing while knowing little to nothing about that thing, even after the information was practically dropped in their lap with the answer to their question being less than 10 sentences in to the provided reference.

I think the way things are going this probably won't be a scruples question or hypothetical exercise for much longer. It won't be so much about whether it's a good idea and more about, when it becomes an unavoidable necessity, how to we get our culture to make sense around it. It might even be worse than the way things are right now and that might be completely beside the point.

That's what I can't figure out either. Abstinence doesn't seem to work, so the logical alternative is birth control, not letting the poor starve because one thinks they are no different from birds!

By the way, people who are mentally impaired (i.e. ret*d) usually have much more compassion for those less fortunate than themselves than those right-wing, fundamentalist knuckle-draggers who think Ayn Rand was a great philosopher. People like that make me sick, because not only have they NO idea what the poor have to endure, but they openly admit they wouldn't give a rat's ass even if they did (plus, they're actually PROUD of that)!

A-FRIGGIN'-MEN!