Four Thousand Dollars A Sandwich

Sultan Knish: You Can't Save the World: "Every year, activists and politicians announce that for only twenty billion or two hundred billion we can end world hunger, educate every child or give every family their own cow. These proposals all apply the free enterprise logic of solving a problem by 'buying' a solution. But you can't buy solutions to human problems the way that you can solve engineering problems by building a house on the edge of a cliff. People have to become their own solutions. Buying a solution for them won't work.

And even if it could work, it wouldn't work on that scale. Helping people isn't like building cars and aid isn't mass production. Throwing more money and people at the problem only makes it that much harder to solve.

Buying a homeless man a sandwich for two dollars is a direct investment of resources. Appropriating twenty billion dollars to feed a sandwich to every homeless man in America will feed sandwiches to a small percentage of the homeless at a cost of four thousand dollars a sandwich."

This is another RTWT from Daniel.  But check out what I've highlighted.