Loads of proposals, all missing the obvious: solve poverty. Portugal and south Europe in general suffer greatly from it. Stats make the region look good on paper but reality is very different.
The link between drug use and poverty is far from clear. While there is a correlation between drug addiction and poverty, there has not been a causal relationship shown between the two. In many cases, poverty may be a result of drug addiction rather than a cause. Consider the much talked about opioid epidemic, for example. The people getting these prescriptions tend towards middle rather than lower class. When the pill supply runs out, either because they can’t afford them anymore or can’t find a doctor to prescribe them, they turn to much cheaper and readily available street drugs like heroin, and at that point they’re more or less locked into a downward spiral into poverty.
All of this is to say that if we were to somehow “solve poverty” (even putting aside the vast oversimplification made by such a statement), while it might reduce rates of drug addiction, it by no means would be an overall solution to the problem. Addiction respects no socioeconomic boundaries.
The link between drug use and poverty is not relevant. It's only addiction and unhealthy drug use that are problematic. Alcohol being the number 1 problematic drug by far.
You jumped through a lot of hoops to explain that there is an avenue from middle class to poverty through drugs, but any avenue from drug use to poverty pales in comparison to the avenues from poverty to drug addiction. People who have no place in society, because they have nothing worth contributing, or for whatever other reason they end up in poverty, they find good feelings and usefulness in drugs, in the participation with others in a similar position.
The link between poverty and drug use is very very clear.
Thanks, but the poor are not necessarily drug abusers. Drug abusers may fall into poverty, but not the way around. There's a wealth of drug abuse in rich societies - the fact that SF, one of the richest city on the earth, became a drug hot spot is an example.
give people money so they can buy food, clothing, and shelter.
there are solutions that have worked in the past. the problem is the US center-right doesn't like them because they can be abused, and it's far worse for one person in a million to have something given to them that they don't deserve than for a million people to be helped.
Who’s going to pay for that? Why would those people want to work if they can just freeload?
There are serious problems with welfare programs. They’ve been the downfall of entire countries. Look at Argentina where the bloated government payroll can be viewed as a sort of work for welfare program. The country can’t afford it and its currency blows up on a regular basis as a result.
That’s not saying you should have no welfare programs, but there’s a balance to be maintained. Probably it should be time limited so people are given a sort of “financial rehab”, but not disincentivized to work. And it shouldn’t stop if you get a job, why, just why would you want an incentive against that.
Some people seem to think there can be consumption without production or life without work, but that’s logically incoherent.
One of the big reasons I left Canada is I didn’t like paying for the freeloaders. I didn’t like the high taxes. The other big reason was the insane real estate bubble that priced me out of the market. Between the two of those, I have better opportunities elsewhere.
This is objectively true. There are plenty of people who would rather have a meager lifestyle on welfare than have to work. You can argue what the percentage is, but you can’t deny that’s above zero.
Preventing the rich from getting richer does nothing in and of itself to help the poor. You might do things to help the poor that as a side effect make it harder to accrue absurd amounts of wealth, but if your goal from the outset is simply to eliminate all billionaires, there are lots of ways to do that that will only end up hurting the poor as well.
Can we reasonably assume that in the idea of "looking at the ultra rich to help solving poverty", there is fundamentally an idea that... well... it should be done in a way that will help poverty?
Or was it that unclear that I was talking about solving poverty, with the idea that all the money that goes for ultra rich could actually be distributed better?
Rhetoric matters, and you didn't say "looking at the ultra rich to help solve poverty", you said "prevent the ultra rich [from] get[ting] even richer". If you had said the former, I wouldn't have objected. What you actually said felt more like class warfare than a serious proposal to help poor people.
You can do us a favor and outline for us how doing that is a first step to solving poverty. Otherwise it seems like you just regurgitated a populist meme.
Ok, let's say you find a way to distribute the resources evenly between everybody. Haven't you solved poverty then?
Then if you want to solve inequalities, do you think it's easier to start by solving inequalities between the poor people, or is it easier to start by taking money from those who are insanely rich for no good reason?
Your first step is "take" and your second step is "figure it out". If you did figure it out, you wouldn't have to be forcefully taking.
Are you assuming we already have enough resources to solve poverty? Isn't the actual issue that even with perfectly equal distribution we don't have enough resources for every body?
If the pie isn't big enough, why is the communist's focus always on how to divide the pie, rather than growing the pie? Do communists have anything to add at all when it comes to increasing productivity so we can all have more?
Wasn't lack of productivity exactly what killed communism? Even China didn't wake up until it opened its markets.
Inequality isn't increasing because poor people are doing worse. Poor people are doing better. Poor people's conditions are improving faster than they ever have. It's true that the richest people's wealth grew even faster than that, therefore increasing inequality.
But if you really care about the wellbeing of the poor, then you wouldn't distracted by inequality when the conditions are improving. You'd interrupt the most successful ever for the worst system ever, driven by jealousy, bitterness, and moral indignation.
I can't really tell you how communists think, to be honest, because I am not exactly one. It's a weird thing (in the US?) that everyone who is not libertarian is considered communist (and not any communist: mostly the kind that is "the enemy" in cold war era video games, apparently).
There are many systems that would probably be considered communist in the US (at least by those of you who seem to have no clue about anything that is not libertarian) that work really well without genocides. But you'd have to open a book that is not US-centered to see that.
I'm not American, nor am I a libertarian. I'm a socialist Arab.
I still object to communism, and populist memes like "eat the rich." At best they're immature, at worst they're agents of chaos and destruction who actually harm the lives of millions when they get what they want.
I said "prevent the ultra rich from getting even richer", and you understood "murder tens of millions of people for the cause".
That escalated quickly. I would be tempted to say that you completely, absolutely hallucinated the meaning of my words, but then... well English isn't my first language, so maybe that's on me.
Because you think that no non-communist system has ever killed anyone?
The point of the parent is that the fact that USSR collapsed does not mean communism (or any kind of less liberal system, for that matter) is fundamentally bad. Just like getting a crash does not mean that the language is fundamentally bad.
What about this one, following your reasoning: "The Nazi were producing cars, and the Nazi brought us into a world war. Therefore no one should ever produce cars again".
Communism is bad because communists think the ends justify the means and (as you are demonstrating) shamelessly excuse tens of millions of murders (proving they've learned nothing and will do it again when given the chance.)
You obviously have absolutely no idea what communists think, and what "communism" means.
What you are demonstrating is that it is impossible to talk with you. Not sure if that is because you can't understand a basic sentence or just because you aren't open to even learn what a word means before making completely wrong conclusions, but I don't care. We won't have a constructive discussion, let's stop here.
Communists think that it possible to build communism by killing of «bad» (rich) people, until good people, liberated from burden of capitalism, will build communism. In their imagination, it's OK to kill 30% of population to build heaven for them.
Sounds like what I imagine when looking of a cliché about what people learn in the US. Are you from the US? And is it really what you're being taught there? Genuinely interested.
We've got a communist in this thread being dismissive of 30 million dead. Communism is morally an intellectually bankrupt. It's an ideology for the bitter and depraved.
Liberal capitalism prohibits that. Value of human life is equal to infinity, except when in war. Utilitarian or «wild» capitalism did lot of harm to peoples and environment. For example, selling of addictive drugs is very profitable business, which kills or disables people.
You do realize that reducing inequalities is not exactly equivalent to "pure communism theory", which is again not exactly equivalent to "USSR"? Or is that all the same to you?
The combined net worth of all billionaires in Portugal[1] is about 10% of annual government spending [2].
So to within a rounding error, no, it's a poor country full of poor people with an irrelevant number of billionaires. You could destroy all foreign investment and future growth by confiscating literally all of their wealth for 1 year of modestly higher government spending.
indeed, link hands everybody, and chant with me the centrist anthem: better things aren't possible and we should just give up! better things aren't possible and we should just give up! better things aren't possible and we should just give up!
I think there's a vast gulf between abject pessimism, and the sort of useless optimism encapsulated in the casual statement, "Solve poverty" don't you? If someone asked you how people could live longer, you wouldn't be helpfully engaging if the response was, "Solve death."
