People want their caring to mean something. That’s why a lot of people have big problems with capitalism as it explicitly doesn’t care about people and their well-being. Yet capitalism materially helps an order of magnitude more people than charity or a misguided economic system made with the poor in mind, like socialism. But the reason capitalism is so much better at helping the poor is that it that it actually cares about the poor in a much more concrete way than any other system as it cares about their collective spending power.

Now if you take the poor and the middle class all together, that is a massive amount of spending power — much more so than all rich people together. If you have a business that caters only to the rich — like selling yachts — that’s a niche market. To get insanely rich in capitalism, you need to cater to the poor — you need a Walmart. So many things in capitalism start out just for the rich — flat screen TVs, cellphones, electricity, indoor plumbing — but capitalism dictates you need to figure out how to do those things cheaper so you can sell to everyone if you want to get really really rich. And that’s why the poor in the U.S. have luxuries that the rich from a hundred years ago couldn’t even imagine.

So while charity and socialism say you need to sacrifice to help the poor and in exchange you’ll get a good feeling, capitalism says you can become a millionaire helping the poor. So it’s no wonder why one gets 1000 times more takers. The problem is this is religiously offensive to many people. “It should hurt to help the poor! You shouldn’t gain from it!” So while capitalism has drastically decreased poverty and malnutrition in the world over the last century (all while population has drastically increased), people still rail against it. Because of their pride. People want their intense caring to mean something. But the irony is they don’t actually care about the poor or they’d suck it up and support capitalism. Instead, they choose their pride over the poor.

NOTE: This shouldn’t be seen as a condemnation of charity which I believe to be every person’s duty. It’s just charity is a band-aid, not a cure.

This should be read as a condemnation of socialism, though. It’s awful and it kills people. Leave that turd in the last century.