Yes, agreed. The current system in the US is so far from economic justice that it’s hard to even talk about particular details of how to improve it, because the whole thing is such a gilded-age disaster.

I sorta sympathize with this dude who’s railing against “welfare,” because there is a good point there. I don’t think the goal should be just giving money whenever they seem like they need it. However, your point is equally well-taken; if someone’s just fucked, then turning them out on the street maybe along with their family definitely isn’t the answer. I keep bringing up the New Deal because I feel like that’s pretty close to the answer. You can have a job if you want to work. The government is going to out-and-out create a whole bunch of jobs doing stuff that really badly needs doing, and if you want one of them, let’s fuckin’ get to work. Having a system where the majority of “jobs” are pretty low paying, miserable on a day to day level, and not doing much of anything for anybody involved, is the problem. Then on top of that, if something outside your control changes, you might get turned out on the street, or maybe we give you this minimal handout. Doing that handout seems, to me, better than not, but the problem goes a lot deeper.

There’s a bunch of work to be done. We need to improve education in this country, we should be trying to mitigate the apocalyptic damage that climate change is going to cause, we badly need to fix the roads and bridges and electrical infrastructure, stuff like that. There’s no shortage of real problems to work on. The problem is that the system doesn’t do anything to match up the huge population that wants to have a worthwhile job, with the massive piles of resources (wages) our technological efficiency makes available, with the massive amount of work to be done. It seems like we want everyone to just keep going to their office admin or retail jobs or whatever making $11/hr until we all sink into the boiling sea.