[ralusek]

As with the significant downsides accompanying most welfare programs, their proponents tend to operate on the kind of knee jerk, surface level compassion that mostly serves to their own benefit. Aid that doesn't serve to primarily "help those to help themselves" tends to rob populations of agency, purpose, and competency.

[AngryData]

That is why ive always been an advocate for tools as aid. Give someone a shirt, the local tailor loses out and the people become reliant on free shirts. Give them food, local farmers suffer and grow less food. But if you give them a loom? They produce and sell more shirts and fabric than ever before for cheap. Give a farmer a tractor, he farms more and produces more food and prospers from it. And there are so many other tools that could do so much. Send a lathe and a mill, now you can make your own machine parts, you can even make another lathe and mill, and perhaps a tool and die industry starts out giving jobs and produces all the other tools the locals need to survive. Need power? Well tools can build a windmill, or a generator. Need water? Tools can build you a well pump, or repair the old broken pump. Need transportation? Tools maintain your old modes of transport and builds new forms of transport. Low on materials for your tool projects? You can build mining drills, rails, mine carts, rock crushers, ore separators, ect.

Without tools, you can't build but the most basic shit out of scavenged trash. With tools, you can make scavenged trash into a goldmine of necessary materials. Industrialization is a story of building out a catalog of tools from your previous generation of tools, over and over and over again until you have every tool that everybody else has.