• AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Wasteful is the wrong word. Waste implies this is some kind of poor planning, inefficiency or oversight.

    Capitalism truly is all about efficiency, literally at the expense of basic humanity.

    This isn’t unintentional waste, this is intentional separation of the poor from resources. This is intentional artificial scarcity. The fact that many are literally separated from and thus lack a bed (or a roof, or food, etc) is what makes a bed a more valuable commodity for those with enough capital to purchase one from the private owner class through vendors like this one. If basic twin beds were publically available or subsidized, it would lower the capital value and profit potential of the swankier beds. And that is something the owners won’t tolerate.

    Under unrestrained market capitalism, there need to be people dying in the streets, otherwise people won’t appreciate the capital value of purchasing what they need to live.

    We Americans cast our sub-optimal capital batteries out to die of exposure. This is by design. If, as an American not born into wealth, you refuse or are unable to generate value for the owners directly, you will still have an important economic function you will be forced to fulfill: a capitalism scarecrow, meant to scare the wage slaves back to work on Monday, making money for the owners in exchange for minimal subsistence.

    We could house and shelter all our fellow Americans, it isn’t a matter of resources or space. We choose not to, and we also antagonize our powerless homeless as the villains selfishly lowering our property values by continuing to exist while destitute. We don’t, because market capitalism incentivises cruelty for profit, and we refuse to reign it in for fear of slowing its self serving growth/metastasis at the expense of the society it is supposed to serve.

    This is an image of our economy’s and society’s waste intential, greed incentivised cruelty. We Americans are a cruel people far more interested in getting more than our neighbors than entertaining being part of a society.

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      Would this homeless person have a home if the bed store didn’t exist? Or what is the actual alternative that you’re looking for?

      If you give away the beds, the bed store does not exist, and people who can afford beds wouldn’t be buying beds. Then the people who might have worked in the bed store don’t have jobs and they perhaps are also sleeping on the street.

      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        In case you don’t understand what “metaphor” or “visualization” means, nobody is saying that this exact store is a reason for the homelessness.