The Devil Is In the Details

I first heard of those P&G satanic rumors when I started working there. I thought it was some kind of a joke, but apparently some people took it seriously. When it got to the point that they believed it was actually hurting sales, the company's legal department tracked down some of the rumor mongers and took them to court. At least that's what our managers told us. I don't remember hearing anything about it in the news media, but I wasn't paying much attention to the news in those days.

You're probably right that people think of money spent on their own issue is a wise investment, while money spent on other people's issue is a total waste, but there is another, more objective way to look at it. If your car is leaking oil, the logical solution is to get it fixed so it stops leaking. If it runs out of oil, the engine will seize up and be permanently damaged so, if you don't have the time or money to fix it right now, you can check the oil level more frequently and add oil as needed. If you keep doing that indefinitely, though, you may reach a point when you have spent more on oil than it would have cost you to fix the leak.

Then again, some cars are not worth fixing. If the transmission is going bad, the body's rusted out,  and the engine has 200,000 miles on it, you may elect to keep dumping oil in it for another month or so while you shop around for a better car. When I was driving through Alaska and the Yukon Territory, I frequently saw cars that looked like they had been pushed off the road and abandoned. A guy at one of the gas stations explained to me that it was okay to salvage parts from those cars, if they looked like they had been there for awhile, because the owners were never coming back for them. The cost of having them towed hundreds of miles to where they could be fixed exceeded the total value of the cars. I asked him why the cops didn't have them towed and impounded until the owner paid all associated costs. He said that the cops around there were spread out pretty thin, and they had more important things to do with their time than that.

The same can be said about derelict buildings, some of them aren't worth fixing up, and some of them aren't even worth demolishing. An urban derelict building will eventually be demolished as a matter of public safety if there is money in the budget to do it but, if the city is broke, the building might stand there until looters, arsonists, and the forces of nature reduce it to ruble. Buildings in rural areas are often left to rot like that because the owner has no plans for the site and/or the time and money to do anything about it. One thing the owner isn't likely to do is slap another coat of paint on it just to improve its appearance.

Of course people are more important than cars or buildings, but some of the same principles still apply. When I say that just throwing money at the problem won't help, I don't mean we shouldn't spend money to help people. I mean that we should put the money where it will do the most good instead of just dealing it out like cards in a poker game. Otherwise, we will eventually run out of cards and the players still won't have what they need to play the game effectively.