How are we going to get people to work for peanuts if we cannot frighten them with the threat of homelessness? The problem here comes when everything starts to become unaffordable for more and more people, and they start to look at the peanuts they are given and start asking how they are supposed to pay for things.
I read a really depressing article about what happens to all the returns that people send back from online shopping. In a regular store, an item would be tried on and then put back on the rack if it doesn't fit. With online shopping, they can't just put it back into rotation, especially if the clothes were packaged from the factory in bags already. Most of these items end up getting donated or thrown away. Now, because there are some things from some very high end places, there are some items that they don't want to donate here in the states because it would "dilute the brand".
Right now, I see a lot of the same patterns. We are withholding things from people in order to make sure that commercial entities can function. We have decided to gut social programs and not fund any new programs so that we have enough to buy weapons--because this is one of the few things we actually do make over here--and bail out corporate bad actors. We are letting people die from preventable and treatable diseases, while limping our anemic "service based" economy along, because that's the only care we are going to invest in. Over and over papers and models show that higher wages, nationalized medical care, and sick leave can help our economy improve, but corporations do not want to raise wages because the masses might actually come to expect a living wage and a medical system built for everyone.
Did John Oliver hit on the diseases that we are finding in homeless populations that we thought we had eradicated like trench foot and bubonic plague? Part of the reason we have societal standards has to do with disease control. When society breaks down, this sort of stuff happens. We forgot that it takes all of us together to move forward and have honed in on individual freedom as our only focus.
