Wanted: True Selflessness

Between Thomas Sowell's "Needs" and Peter Singer's "The Singer Solution to World Poverty", in taking their arguments to heart and following them closely, everyone in the USA would be just surviving, and all of our wealth would be sent overseas. Sowell rightly defines 'needs' as anything we can't get along with by not having them, and 'not getting along with' means surviving. So, if we only spend our money on what is needed to keep us alive and healthy, then we could be sending upwards of 50 and 75 percent of our earnings to charities! Great for the overseas recipients, but sort of a standard-of-living drop for us here. And also a sort of switch in perspective and roles. Both authors present extreme ideas in order to make us stop and think about what we are doing or not doing. The idea is to see these far-off arguments and make us wake up, so that we can realize what we actually truly need, what we are fooling ourselves in to thinking that we need, or how little we are actually doing to help alleviate fixable world health problems while we lavishly overspend on our own aesthetic tendencies.