Thread by @corymassimino

As far as human problems go, distribution severely pales in comparison to coordination and production.

Aggregating the amount of goods and the amount of people in need of them in a given area doesn't tell us how to get actual goods to actual people. "Give the homeless homes" or "give the hungry food" are empty aims in need of knowledge concerning the goods and people in question.

This emptiness becomes more apparent the more you increase the scale of the area in question and the diversity of the goods and people in question. "Homes" and "food" are not abstract platonic forms but particular objects existing in certain places and ways.

Plucking homeless people up out of wherever they are (regardless of their situation/family/friends/job) and shoving them into some existing home (regardless of its place, proximity to social/economic opportunities, access to water/affordable food, etc.) is not a real solution.

Trying to shove the existing set of homes and food at the homeless and hungry is not a viable solution to current (let alone future) homeless and hungriness. We need the continual creation of new homes and food that can be fit into the plans and projects of the homed and fed.

The emptiness of aims stressing distribution becomes that much more apparent when you consider the prospect of redistributing the resources of society 500 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, times whose cumulative amount of resources are a fraction of what exists now.

Noble egalitarian impulses become corrupted by short-term thinking. Society becomes a machine with different inputs and outputs to be mechanically controlled by benevolent technocrats (still haven't met any of those) instead of an evolving ecosystem of emergent institutions.

It's worth noting I have no problem with *redistribution* as such. I just view it as an effect rather than a cause. Surely any transition from the current neo-mercantilist military-banking-industrial complex to a free society would involve an ENORMOUS redistribution of wealth.

It would just be a redistribution of wealth from the extractors and gatekeepers to the creators and rightful owners. Trying to do that through the middle man of the state is counterproductive since the state is the primary mechanism of extracting and gatekeeping wealth.