As long as resources are limited there will be money or an equivalent mechanism for valuing and controlling those resources. Resources can be anything from land, food, knowledge, political power, etc.
Both of those require resources. Or are you going to grow your own trees and build a log cabin yourself? How much time will that take? Can you build it by yourself or will you need someone elses help? These are all resources that are not unlimited, and there are trade offs whatever way you allocate said resources.
Edit: also power, water, wastewater, internet for a house are services run using limited resources
First off there’s lots of housing or housable space - office buildings with tons of vacant rooms, Airbnb style properties that are just profit machines, hotels rarely at capacity, abandoned or unaffordable houses, vacation homes. There’s plenty of housing.
Then let’s talk about restaurants and grocery stores and farms and factories where food is routinely thrown away daily. Can’t let employees take food home from the fast food joint because then they’ll just make extra food, so instead you end up tossing tons of perfectly good food. I’d help my dad pick up “old” food from grocery stores for a local shelter and they had to still only take some because the volume of usable food being tossed was too much for one shelter. There’s plenty of food.
Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble? If, for instance, every vacant property that has working power/water/sewage/internet was filled, would that be too much strain? Would the system that was planned for that capacity buckle under the weight of what it’s made to bear? I don’t buy it.
“ We can house feed and care for every person on the planet but we don’t because money. A made up concept that has no actual value outside of what we place on it.”
Try do anything you are talking about without the involvement of money or barter. It ain’t going to happen.
No one is going to work in a crappy job if they can avoid it.
Who is going build new properties or repair dilapidated buildings without money or some other incentive?
Why would anyone build more than they personally need?
Who is going to build/repair/modify homes for disabled people to live in without financial incentive?
> Power, water, waste, internet - if suddenly everyone who didn’t have these things did have them, do you think the infrastructure would crumble?
Overall you're right, but you also might be surprised at how fragile and insufficient our infrastructure is. There are many documented cases of problems with power delivery when sudden spikes in usage occur. There have been a few articles about it just this summer due to the record breaking heat. Internet services routinely oversell their service on the assumption that most people won't use what they pay for, and any customers who try to use every bit they're paying for will have their service disconnected.
These restrictions are artificial too, people and companies pocketing millions (if not billions) in profits could easily improve their systems to meet higher demand but even though they are swimming in money and have everything they need they won't tolerate earning a penny less, and they act like they're dying when their profit increases if it doesn't also increase at least as much as it did last quarter. They just push all the costs to consumers and taxpayers who are already struggling under the unending greed of countless other people and companies.
That's why the idea of giving people food, housing, and healthcare scares the shit out of some people. They know that somehow, they'll end up paying for it, even when the reality is that often their lives would be much better anyway. The truth is that it shouldn't have to cost the people who can least afford it.
It is fragile and a lot does need to be done to make it more resilient - the incentive isn’t there under the current capitalist model. For example, in the US, power companies can’t make a profit from anything except doing new construction[1]. This is why we had the Camp Fire - a PG&E system had faults with no incentive to get fixed that eventually failed and led to a devastating wildfire. We can do these things, but the people most capable also happen to care the lease.
All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with. I believe there will come a time where it is no longer necessary, but this will require levels of cooperation, education, and coordination that we are not nearly prepared to handle as a species.
For what it's worth, I worked for a while at a fast food joint that did allow employees to take food home, or to make extra of it and just consume it on premises during lunch break. Leftover food was frozen and donated to a shelter twice a week. This place is still in business and as far as I know still operating with these policies. Cynacism aside, I don't even think the place is that unique. If you look around you will find lots of groups motivated by something more than just the mighty dollar, perhaps even most enterprise. This despite the corrosive effects of capitalism you're fretting over.
I think you reiterated the above commenter's point: we shouldn't have to rely on such excess and benevolence to make sure every last person is being fed. That should be a baseline human right. The existence of charity itself is an outcome of inequality.
I may be fretting over capitalism, but I think I do so with justification. I can’t say which system would be better, but I see the one destroying the planet and creating an arbitrary system of haves and have nots where two of the largest factors in whether you have a comfortable life are who your parents are and where your born - it’s a crapshoot.
> All the excess you cite is a result of this (albeit flawed) capitalist system we live with.
My original point was responding to the bemoaning that we don’t have enough resources for everyone. Well we do, they just get wasted. We’d still have those resources or at least the ability to create them under any other system.
I appreciate your viewpoint. I spent many decades believing similarly, that money isn't real and money has no inherent value or purpose, only muddying the waters of production. Over the years, however, I've developed a more nuanced take on the matter. (And on a personal note, in retrospect it was this belief that kept me in poverty, not the children of the wealthy.)
I completely agree that we have "enough" for everyone at this point in time and many of our ills reduce to a distribution problem. I very much do not agree that just any other system could have brought us to this point.
Intuitively if we could snap our fingers and make all money disappear tomorrow life would go on without a hiccup or any noticible change so long as everyone just keeps doing what they're doing now. But that's the rub, would everyone keep doing what they're doing?
Our economic system is the system attempting to solve this distribution problem. The optimist in me still believes we can create a better system, but I have spent years trying to understand what that system looks like and I have yet to find it. (I am still eager to hear your proposal.)
I am increasingly convinced the solution will ultimately need to leverage our modern and novel digital communications networks as well as other recent and perhaps future innovations, so I don't agree that such a system could have just arisen at any point in the past and carried us here.
As an addendum, I believe any system that effectively solves this problem while delivering the same or higher level of resources for humanity will run into the issue of destroying the planet. This is an orthogonal problem that the optimist in me also believes we will eventually find a solution for, but if we don't the discussion will become somewhat moot.
on a global level, no. On a state level, especially a state like Califonia, it's more questionable but still feasible.
Unfortunately, this is more of a city level issue where a disproportionate amount of people are in the large metropolitan cities of San Diego, San Franciso, and Los Angeles. It probably can be handled if we could move them to other counties, but other counties don't want to inherit that burden. Even if a few did they very likely lack the infrastructure and staff to really support something at scale (not necessarily ALL of these homeless, simply enough to start having the population decrease faster than new ones are created.
