Andrew Carnegie: Should We Help The Homeless?

Andrew Carnegie was the one who wrote the Gospel of Wealth and it was a positive idea for the people who are not wealthy. Carnegie says that the upper class has a responsibility to address the issues of the wealth inequality. In the Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie stated that the wealthy class can be a better state than the government or state. Carnegie also states that the wealthy should dispense wealth and it should be a way that does not promote drunkenness. Carnegie argues that there are two types of wealthy people.

The response to poverty in the Gilded Age was the rich and the poor not being able to come to an agreement in response to those who can hardly make ends meet. Andrew Carnegie was one of the wealthiest men during the Gilded Age. Carnegie was not the best man to work for because he was against labor unions and approved using violence against his own employees. In “Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth” It talks about how the rich and the poor could come together if they had the “proper administration of wealth.” Carnegie thought it was better to build institutions instead of give to the poor because the strength of the mind and body will benefit the community while solving the problem between the rich and the poor.

Carnegie thinks it is better to build public institutions than give charity to the poor because the poor need to have the “desire to improve” and find help in these public institutions. (Carnegie 30). He believes that rather wealthy “Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives” can find the proper use for their money, which is to help the community. (Carnegie 29). By just giving money to the poor the wealthy are doing all their work and instead the poor should find the assistance they need to improve their lives.

Rather, he thought that wealthy men had a responsibility to determine how the money they made was spent. Carnegie himself became a huge philanthropist and his essay, “The Gospel of Wealth” started a large wave of philanthropy. His essay states that the “surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”

Why should people who go to work and hold a job be subjected to homelessness in the greatest country in the world? Many other middle-class Americans are too shielded by their almost perfect lives to even see this. Many of them even have the audacity to say that homeless individuals or the lower-class is just lazy. Barbara Ehrenreich directly

The captains of industry believed that the poor people were inferior to the rich people. The rich were superior because they had “wisdom, experience, and the ability to administer”. The duty of a rich person was to help out a poor person which was what was said in the Gospel of Wealth. The Gospel of Wealth is about how the rich person's responsibility is philanthropy. Carnegie believes in charity work so he would donate to libraries, and universities and schools and etc.

The article “The State of Homelessness in America” provides

The current government is creating a situation where more families along with their children are experiencing homelessness. An individual may be considered homeless when they lack permanent housing and have to stay in shelters, abandoned buildings or vehicles, on the streets, or in other forms of unstable situations. Many homeless people start out with jobs and stable residences, but then social and economic factors intervene, causing a rapid change in their living situation causing them to leave, and live on the street. Even with the population of homeless keeps increasing, the government does not aid nor benefit the homeless because they only worsen the homeless problem by having laws that go against homelessness, not helping mentally ill homeless population, and having the lack of subsidized housing.

When people think of others who are poor and less fortunate, they assume that it is people who are living on the street, don’t have a family, and are classified within the homeless population. What they don’t recognize is that is not completely wrong or correct because it is known that not all homeless people live on the streets or don’t have family to support them financially and more. The first time I recognized this was when I volunteered at the Our Daily Bread Employment Center in Baltimore. After observing and interacting with some of the families and individuals who attend the hot meal program year round, I not only recognized that most of the people came from stable homes and have jobs but also that 1 out of 10 people were homeless by

Homelessness is a product of social inequalities. Karl Marx stated that the capitalist society produces two prominent classes which are in conflict with each other, bourgeoisie and proletariats. The bourgeoisie are the oppressors who own the means of production and the proletariats are the oppressed workers who labor for the bourgeoisie. Capitalism is distinguished not by privilege but instead by individuality of property ownership and that those who create the conditions of the oppressed group express this power in the form of laws that function to serve the bourgeoisie’s interests (Marx, 2004, p.129).

Carnegie states that wealth is the great “fortunes” amassed by the millions and not the “moderate sums” that the poor attempt to collect by “many years

Underpinnings and Effectiveness of Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” In Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth”, Carnegie proposed a system of which he thought was best to dispose of “surplus wealth” through progress of the nation. Carnegie wanted to create opportunities for people “lift themselves up” rather than directly give money to these people. This was because he considered that giving money to these people would be “improper spending”.

More people suffer from homelessness than we realize. We often take for granted having a home to go to. I completely agree with Anna about her feelings on homelessness. I often see the homeless on the side of the road and I normally refer to them as homeless people but what I fail to realize is, that “homeless person” has a name, that “homeless guy” is a human being just like the rest of us longing for certainty, stability and privacy. Those “homeless people” are human beings without a home.

The issue of homelessness in America has been evident since the early 1600’s. Across the country men, women and children spend their nights on the streets not knowing when or if they will ever find a permanent home. States and federal officials or city councils have tried to alleviate or at least reduce the number of homeless over the last several decades at a city, state or national level but it continues to be an ongoing problem. There is a multitude of factors that account for the growing homeless population that affects each state in the country differently. Though there are many contributing factors that contribute to the amount of people living on the street at any given night in the U.S.

Communities should develop plans to help these people in need and give them a place to stay instead of living on the streets. Society has failed to support these people in need because of the primary focus being on the more fortunate who can give back to the society. I say that the homeless should be prioritized over the wealthy because they are more in need than they are. This being said, we can never blame the individual for what society has put them through. I do believe that if society gives homeless people a second chance they deserve they could strive to make their lives better with our help.