I completely agree that we need beauty -- I love the concept of funding the arts, but there have to be priorities and we should not rely on the rich to make decisions like this in the name of charity.
I quoted it lower in the thread, but I LOVE the poem by Gil Scott-Heron "Whitey on the moon" --
"A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the moon"
A civilized society doesn't rely on the generosity of philanthropists in order to take care of the most vulnerable among us. We all pay taxes to keep the rats off sister Nell.
How anyone (including the super-wealthy) choose to prioritize how they spend and give away their money, it absolutely is their choice. I personally think Bill Gates has done a better job than almost anyone.
"A civilized society doesn't rely on the generosity of philanthropists in order to take care of the most vulnerable among us."
I don't understand this sort of logic. One of the hallmarks of civilization is people doing the right thing even when they aren't forced to. People marvel at the fact that you can lose your wallet in Japan and get it back without anything missing. Yet you're saying that using force to provide for the needy is somehow more civilized than people doing it voluntarily?
In a civilized society, we'd be able to solve our social problems without forcing people to do it. I'm not sure how we get there, but that's the society I'd rather live in.
I would like the kind of society that doesn't need to use force (legitimized by democratically elected representatives, checks and balances, and the rule of law) to take care of the most vulnerable, but I have yet to see any precedent of that. You mention Japan, they have a very pervasive government social safety net.
Places without effective governments? Those are places where people do routinely die of hunger and treatable disease.
That's an interesting article about how Japan hadn't yet extended their safety net (which includes things like universal health care) to the emerging edge case of mass layoffs, something that just didn't happen in their culture before.
"the number of nonregular workers took off after an easing of labor laws in 1999" .. "To receive unemployment insurance, for instance, workers must have held the same job for at least a year, effectively excluding most temporary workers" .. "Today, 34.5 percent of Japan’s 55.3 million workers are nonregular employees"
Sounds like a third of the workforce is at risk of homelessness any time their temp runs out and this has been developing for ~ 15 years.
I quoted it lower in the thread, but I LOVE the poem by Gil Scott-Heron "Whitey on the moon" --
"A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the moon"