THREAD: As my #PledgeForHumanity yesterday, I spent the day with Louisiana #YangGang volunteering at a home for the homeless. It's been in operation for almost 17 years. The founder who owns and runs it is an amazing woman named Francis Seymore. It's called the House of Serenity.
It's inspiring how much good one person can do. Francis was living in California when she decided to buy a place in Ponchatoula, LA that could be a shelter from homelessness. Running the place is a month to month expense she just manages to cover. In her words, God provides.
She knows there are poverty-targeted programs that are supposed to be helping places like hers with expenses, and yet despite being the only shelter for many miles around, she gets nothing. That money is controlled by politicians who apparently feel there are better uses for it.
But this isn't only a government bureaucracy problem. @tylerperry bought a home for his mom just blocks away and yet despite multiple attempts to contact him to help alleviate homelessness in the neighborhood, she's heard nothing. She isn't some huge non-profit. It's just her.
She doesn't even have a website or the ability to accept donations online. It's a very small operation run by someone who simply truly cares and is doing what she can to help make lives better. In my eyes, her story highlights part of the problem with our existing system.
There is so much money out there in so few hands, how can that money reach people like her? Instead that money goes from the rich to large well-known charities. It creates all kinds of well-paying jobs for all kinds of people who aren't in need. It does not trickle down to her.
The same is true with the government. Gate keepers are in place to pick and choose where money should go, based on who and what they know, and their own personal preferences of where and under what conditions money should flow. This is the poverty industry in action.
An entire structure has built up around the existence of poverty that only serves to perpetuate it so countless people can parasitically exist upon it. The belief that the rich can somehow philanthropically get their money to everyone who needs it is a bullshit fantasy.
It's also bullshit to think that the government can utilize bureaucracy to solve poverty by doing anything and everything that avoids simply providing money directly and without conditions. UBI is needed to bypass all the gatekeepers to end the parasitism that depends on poverty.
Besides massively and immediately reducing homelessness, UBI will also empower everyone as individuals to find those like Francis in their own backyards and donate their own time and money to helping those who still need more than just UBI, and who govt programs don't reach.
UBI also means more people doing as Francis has done. It means more people putting their foot down and using their own time and resources to directly help others. The Freedom Dividend means more people putting #HumanityFirst. And that's what the #PledgeForHumanity is all about. 
