More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.
They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.
Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.
I’ve always found that logic weird on their part.
If I am planning to do it anyway, because I recognize it is the right thing to do, what difference does it make if there are laws in place to ensure the less ethical among us do it as well?
Because it doesn’t feel like a charitable deed when the money is taken from you by force.
This is like arguing for people to be allowed to rob you at gunpoint as long as they have a family to feed.
If you have more money than you could spend in a lifetime yes, you should be robbed at gunpoint to feed family’s.
And now you know why most conservatives are armed to the teeth. It’s to protect themselves from people like you.
See, the thing about charity is that when it’s done correctly, it helps both, the giver and the receiver. The receiver feels good because their needs have been met, and the giver feels good for having done a good deed. As soon as you put a gun into the equation, that all goes out of the window, and it becomes a win-lose situation. Only one person is going to walk away satisfied, and the other might end up dead.
And if you think that’s not a big loss because you hated them anyway, consider that one day, it’ll be you.
Yes yes someday all the money will trickle down on me and it’ll be my turn to be rich and then I’ll get angry when my “all” my wealth is taken away from me and I’m just well off. They might as well murder me at that point I mean sheesh
Imagine going from upper class to just upper class. The horror!!!
Why would you want to get rich in the first place if you believe that it’s more important to feed the poor? You’d be no better than the people you profess to hate, and you could easily avoid getting robbed by just donating anything you don’t need to charity.
Bro that’s crazy has it crossed your mind that I don’t want to be rich? Put me in that position and I’d be paying for ads and shit to get the government to tax people like me more.
Your not gonna catch me on any of that “Oh so you think wealthy people shouldn’t exist” bs either btw. In a vacuum I think people should be able to make a lot of money from stuff they do but billionaires shouldn’t exist full stop. The amount of good you can do with merely one billion dollars is genuinely kind of inconceivable and we have multiple multi-billionaires, and not anywhere close to enough good being done by them. They simply shouldn’t exist. They’ll be just as happy being multimillionaires though I’d quite like taxes to dramatically ramp up once your in the 10 millions, even that is far above where middle class is meant to be.
Why on earth would you do that when you could just skip the middle men and give the money directly to the poor? That seems a lot more efficient.
Philanthropy is ineffective, that’s our current system and it’s not working
This is a flawed analogy, if Tax’s are the equivalent of being robbed at gun point, the real question is, would you rather be robbed by someone trying to feed their family or robbed by someone just adding to their pile of money. You’re getting taxed no matter what, ideally I would prefer that money go to help people.
The problem with taxes is that a rather large chunk of it just goes to the military industrial complex and other wasteful government spending, and very little of it actually ends up helping to feed the poor. If you donate to charity directly, there’s a much better chance that most of the money goes to actual people in need instead of the pockets of corrupt politicians.
I agree there, and I don’t think anyone is arguing that charities don’t generally do good work. I don’t want to see what little of that chunk of taxes that do go to helping people be cut away leaving only more of taxes to go in to the MIC, corruption and waste.