Yeah, sadly charity will only work in a meaningful way when individuals decide to do it instead of putting it off on the government or corporations.
But the two main foggy ideologies have their flaws:
1) The liberals prefer to have government do it because at least then it gets done no matter what and because it's centralized and has the potential to be directed.
2) The conservatives prefer charity for the reason I mentioned above but generally don't want to give anything into it because they have an infinite number of rationalizations for how the poor deserve to be poor because they're lazy.

The lesson: Ideologies suck and as long as we have these two dumb views, the problem is never going to get better. The cons don't believe in helping people get out of poverty other than in fixing the macrostructure of the economy (and making themselves rich in the process) and libs trust too much in bureaucracy.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside