So, gentlemen, this is the challenge:
What we want is to give more money to a wider variety of people, with fewer strings attached, so that they can use it to suffer less and flourish more.
(I realize that this is not actually what everyone wants. But, for purposes of this discussion, we are presuming that it is in fact a goal.)
You may justify this goal, internally or within your own little discursive circle, with an appeal to universalist compassion. There is no deserving or undeserving, there is only weal and woe. And that’s fine. But – I would posit – politically speaking that will not fly, not anytime in the foreseeable future. I don’t care how airtight your philosophy is, how sincere and noble your emotions are. You will not be able to sell most of the relevant people on universalist compassion. The cultural defenses against malefic actors are powerful and deeply embedded. The fear of being made a sucker runs deep, and there are actually good reasons for that. You will not be able to get people to stop worrying about the prospect of throwing endless resources into a black hole. “Deserving” and “undeserving” are not going away.
But they don’t have to mean exactly what they mean right now. “Deserving” certainly doesn’t have to map to “employed, in a standard full-time Late-Capitalism-comprehensible kind of way.”
For example, one readily-available alternative is @mitigatedchaos‘s notion of nationalism, where “deserving” maps to something like “a member of my particular sovereign cultural polity.” I don’t think that this is a good alternative for all sorts of reasons, but I think we’ve seen ample evidence that it can work at scale.
So – what are other good alternatives? How can we redefine our alleged values, such that it’ll be easier to spread the wealth around, while still having values such that the masses won’t recoil from the prospect?