I saw this article the other day about that heartwarming image of the police officer giving the boots to the homeless man, and it's kind of stuck in my craw. Of course, the actual situation is more complicated. Of course, the only thing the poor man sitting in the street barefoot needed to become a productive and sane member of society wasn't boots for gawd's sake. Of course, single moments of charity don't break a cycle of poverty. But, then, what is the point of charity? Especially when it can inspire (or be inspired by) backlash like this has? As an example, I gave to the Rand Paul soup kitchen (I know it's not called that, but it should be) back when that backlash was going on. I know that my donation (even when put with others) was not enough to compensate for the money lost. I'm sure that particular soup kitchen has a lot of work to do. So, what was the point of me giving at that time? Libertarians tend to think of charity as a selfish act (yet also not support government making systematic changes that would actually do things). When there are stories like these, I tend to think they are right. Talk me off the edge, please. Do you care if your charitable acts are effective, or should we just approach charity as "just another drop in the bucket"? How do you make sure your charitable giving is effective? How do you know you're not "glorifying the giver"?
Charity is a surrogate that steps in when governance has utterly failed. In locations or segments of the population where that is the case it is often the only thing standing between those people and utter breakdown. Charity should not be seen as an alternative to government, as the recent Romney vs Obama Sandy pics demonstrated. Individuals can get canned food together. Organized charities can put together first responder tents (including mental health first responders, which the IRC does), clean rubbish and be helpful on a small scale. Governments can put shit back together, airlift people out and provide massive logistical and organizational support on an unreal scale, up to and including deploying military and guard assets. This is also true for the persistent problems such as homelessness here in NYC. No charity or individual could provide anything like the long term care and support of our homelessness programs (inadequate as they are), let alone a first responder system for homelessness. We're actively discouraged from giving directly to the homeless for that very reason. Other stuff, like troubled youth boxing leagues or minority/womens scholarships, are nice coping strategies for handling a stacked deck institutionally speaking (we've created virtual Bantustans with NYCHAland, for example) but no substitute for actually solving the problems that cause them to exist. So it's fine to give but you should prioritize annoying your local government into doing their part.
Single moments of charity don't break a cycle of poverty, but why would you expect them to in the first place? You don't give boots to a homeless man to make all of his problems go away, you give boots to a homeless man so that he can keep his feet warm. Charity doesn't have to be a binary conundrum, in which every thing we do either fixes the problem of poverty in its entirety or isn't worth doing at all. It's perfectly reasonable to point out that giving the boots is one small act that does nothing to address the huge, systemic problem, and that we need to do more to address the systemic problem. Even so, you can still give the man some boots.
Give a man a pair of boots and he'll walk for a year. Teach a man to make boots and he'll remain unemployed because Walmart and he still won't have boots because he can't afford the materials.
Well the key here is bootstraps -- the thing we all used to become productive members of this great society. You see, without boots, this man had nothing to pull himself up from, but now that he has boots everything will change for him! If we check back on this man in a month, we'll see that he has become hotshot business person who goes out to the clubs and does blow with models. Check back in year and we'll see that he's lost his job due to his blow (now crack) habit and is on the streets again. He sold his last pair of Gucci shoes for a crack rock and is now barefoot again. Now what do we do with this poor soul? GIVE HIM ANOTHER PAIR OF BOOTS!
Charity may be a drop in the bucket, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with putting a drop in the bucket. Sentimentality aside, minor bits of charity can make a person's day better, until the media get involved and ruin it. Of course, we do have to think about the consequences of what we give, but the possibility of some unforeseen harm shouldn't deter us from prudent attempts.
The argument against charity is the same as the argument against faith healing. In and of itself it's not bad, but when used as an alternative to real and effective means to treat a problem it's pretty bad.
It has more to do with the lack of productivity enhancing technologies. I read an article recently about a tailor in the city who makes custom suits in the English model that are incredibly fancy, but because he can't get enough volume out the door (client has to be measured, checked against the suit, suit has to be assembled, raw materials bought and paid for, everything delivered, time traveled and all with the requisite flair) and isn't quite well known enough to raise his prices (at that end of the market it's more about label than quality because the quality is so good at all of them that the buyer, not being a skilled member of the trade, lacks the knowledge to differentiate between them and is forced to rely on crowdsourced experience aka what other wealthy tasteful people are wearing) so he has to live way out in the boonies of the city to make ends meet. People like that will find 3D manufacturing techniques a huge asset in expanding their output. Imagine having your basic hyper customized suit building blocks cranked out in moments using a super snazzy design, then assembling them using fancy tailor skills. Output goes up, wastage goes down and everyone is happy. It modularizes the production such that the designer can avoid tedious elements of the work without having to compromise on quality, and further allows them to delegate chunks of the job to others so that they can focus on the design and the 1% of the job that absolutely requires their skills with thread and needle. But getting back to your point, people who are good at making shoes these days open a design firm and sell their work to major companies that then produce the shoes. Or they work in house doing exactly that. Or they design the stuff they want to make and convince a company to do a run speculatively. Shoe makers are doing just fine. The short term homeless are mostly out of work people. They're the people we should be helping with a consumption smoothing safety net. The long term homeless are mostly disabled individuals (mentally or physically) who desperately need society's assistance and a place to stay.
