[geofft]

If charity works great, why doesn't government-mandated charity work even better?

There are a lot of things, like civil defense and firefighting and road building, that historically started working more reliably when they became government-run instead of depending on volunteers or private industry. What makes charity different?

[nine_k]

Government-mandated things usually work worse than the fame things done without governmental intervention.

This is why government is best left to handle things that cannot be adequately done without a central command, like keeping the military forces, or collecting taxes. It can also step in where private or public efforts fail, but don't expect it to be as efficient.

[geofft]

I neither want nor expect it to be efficient, just reliable. Those are two vert different goals. By "efficient" I think you mean something like, as high a percentage of every dollar given as possible goes to where it's needed, and as low as possible goes towards overhead or corruption. By "reliable" I mean that everyone in poverty gets the resources needed to get out, whatever the overhead is needed to get people to that point. I find it a preferable outcome to have one million people worrying how they're going to pay for their next meal, and some guy skimming $1M for himself off the top, than ten million people worrying how they're going to pay for their next meal and nobody getting rich off the process.

I think that's the big difference with things like defense at scale. You don't need war to be cheap, or to optimize dead enemies per dollar; you just need a guarantee that if someone attacks you anywhere and in any manner, there will always be some sort of armed force to defend you. Central command is nice but not necessary. Same with roads; central command is certainly unnecessary, but having reliable nationwide roads is better for a society than intermittent roads where they're profitable.

Do you believe that govermment-run charity will be less reliable than the status quo; that is, do you believe it will help less people? Why?

(I'm not asking about whether it's moral, just whether it works.)

[nine_k]

Being more expensive for the sake of reliability / guaranteed response is fine by me. But relatively often the efficiency is so low, that, given the required scale, a low-efficiency solution becomes infeasible, prohibitively expensive.

The expense is not always monetary. While US clinics ask exorbitant amounts of money, clinics in certain countries with universal healthcare ask for large amounts of time. You need a surgery? Please wait 4-6 months. (E.g. https://expathealth.org/healthcare-news/global-patient-wait-...)

[geofft]

As a matter of amoral public policy (optimizing for "long-term survival and happiness of the people"), it's entirely possible a scheme that gets everyone surgeries with 4-6 month delays is better than one that gets rich people surgeries with 1 month delays and poor people no surgeries at all.

(Your moral system might also find that better, but morality is hard to argue.)

[jquery]

Because socialism has been proven to fail, over and over and over. Roads are not socialism. Roads have not destroyed societies like Venezuela or Cuba. Socialism is when the government decides private property is illegitimate and it fails every time it’s tried. Some amount of socialism may not kill the host but it’s a thing to be feared and wielded carefully not lauded.

[fjsolwmv]

Banana and cotton plantations are capitalism. The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.

[jquery]

> Banana and cotton plantations are capitalism

and? I never said capitalism didn't require any guardrails. Stop straw-manning other people.

> The US is wealthy because it extracted it's wealth from the suffering of others worldwide.

Why is Japan wealthy? South Korea? European countries? Is this the social justice theory of economics? There's not much evidence for that theory. It's pretty clear that capitalism (with appropriate guardrails and the rule of law) is wildly more successful than its alternatives. I think you're trying to argue that capitalism is beside the point and it's war and oppression that creates wealth. That's obviously nonsense.

[alphonsegaston]

You’re right - war and oppression are tools used by Capitalists to secure and grow their wealth.

Japan, South Korea, and side swathes of Europe are wealthy because of their positions as client states in the American Capitalist Imperium.

[geofft]

And US military intervention, economic sanctions, etc. in Venezuela and Cuba aren't to blame at all, I guess?

The US has spent trillions of dollars over the years trying to convince everyone that socialism can't work by making sure it doesn't work. It seems absolutely unscientific to ignore that.

In any case, I am not asking about the abolition of private property, just about government-mandated charity at scale. Let's say you get a marginal tax of 100% on salaries over $200K, and on wealth over $10M. That's more private property than most Americans will ever have in their life. Is tbat proven to fail? Where and how?

[dragonwriter]

> Because socialism has been proven to fail, over and over and over.

Except for Leninism and it's descendents, where has socialism of any kind been tried and failed?