Exactly, there’s a difference between socialism and empathy. A small business should not feel like they have to be charitable toward non customers just to show human decency, to make up for the gaps in our society and to have basic respect for another human. We should feel ashamed that there is such a need. Our society can and should ensure everyone gets basic needs met

Yes, comrade commissar, this comment right here.

This reasoning is founded on the idea that there is at any given time a reasonably just distribution of wealth and the capability of the market to fill most any niche that society needs. Neither is even close to true the best way to get more wealth isn't to do anything in particular it is to already possess it and those who hold the overwhelming majority of wealth act to continually tilt the game board to ensure more of it fills their pockets and absent laws limiting their power and redistributing their wealth inevitably until their entire society collapses.

We and others have been flogging the idea of the market as the solution to all ills for about 3 centuries and their isn't a nation on earth that is anything remotely like purely capitalistic because there is no fucking reason to believe such a thing could ever work. Every functional nation has a central government which subsists on either a massive pile of material wealth it has appropriated for itself like Saudi Arabia or taxes its citizens to perform many functions that the market is ill suited to provide. If Libertarianism worked why has nobody done it in centuries?

You point out the money spent by LA to address homelessness and treat waste as a natural law when it is a function of a defective system not a specific failing which it so obviously is. We burn a bunch of money pretending to solve homelessness because we are shits. Finland solves it by housing nearly everyone because they are not. Hell social security, medicaid, and medicare proves the government CAN if it sets it's mind to it help people successfully.

Localized charity like that just increases inequality in the bigger picture. Individuals and individual businesses tend to help the issues they see around them, but they are blind to stuff they don't know about, and no individual can keep tabs on everything. So people they don't see (like people who live farther away) are less likely to get help.

Of course, this is a feature to some people, for whom it's really important to only help people they deem worthy. This unsurprisingly often means only helping their in-group, like their church congregation or their local community. But the people in most need of assistance and the ones the most capable of providing it rarely live in the same area.

It would be far more efficient if a larger-spanning entity (like a larger non-profit charity or government) provided assistance to everyone in a larger area, ensuring everyone has a baseline standard of living. In my experience the Nordic model, where money or subsidized housing is provided by the government to everyone needing it, works quite well. This does not in fact trash the economy, because most people are willing to work to achieve a higher than baseline standard of living.