It's a deep and complicated part of history, but I think calling out a single main problem really risks skipping over the depth and scale of the problems.

Scattered points - but during the famine to earn 'wage' of insufficient grain ration, you had to work. This happened in work houses and camps, not necessarily in their homes or home areas. Workhouses existed in most towns where labourers lived, leaving their homes and families or after being evicted. Families were split up, Men, Women and Children did not live together. The workhouses and camps had terrible conditions, and the work was hard enough to have injuries and deaths even ignoring the illnesses that spread and grew worse from conditions. The work was often pointless - famine roads for example, roads to nowhere, so the work effort did nothing to improve the situation.

Those that had been evicted for failing to pay their rent, as they couldn't afford food or had not potato crops to sell, were considered convicts. As they were paid for their labour in food and sometimes lodging, they could not work their way out of situation or pay for healthcare when they got sick or injured. Many immigrated as things worsened year-on-year, on famine ships, but were refused and rejected from docking in multiple countries due to fear of the infectious illnesses they carried and burden they would inflict - and those stuck on ships became more unwell.

There was enough food, in fact a surplus in Ireland - but the "excess" was exported and cheaper questionable alternatives were imported for the soup kitchens and workhouses. Potatoes were such a single point of failure not by coincidence - many lived as tenants on landlords land, on tiny holdings but were expected to produce their own food. Potatoes were the only crop able to do this, or rather the holdings had sized down because Potatoes allowed it.

To me, that all screams of a systems failure and would not have been fixed with simply larger rations. Even ignoring the morality part to how the system was formed, how Ireland was ruled and Landlord system worked - the Potato Famine exposed the problems and limitations of the system with urgent crisis. The system did not adapt, did not act proactively or even react, and did not seem to learn in time to respond to a growing crisis.

One of the learnings surely was how terrible the concept is of worrying about people becoming too dependent on assistance in a crisis - debating the morale hazard and long-term dependency concerns runs the risk for short term death, disease and collapse.

It isn't said in Ireland that the famine was caused by the Potato, or by the meagre rations - It's said it was caused by the British, really the system in place rather than the British race but that doesn't simplify as well.

Your web site is down. You're losing $BIGNUM every hour. Someone says, we can work around it if we do this hack in this bit of code. But someone else says, we shouldn't do that, it will add technical debt and make more work for us later on down the line. We need to take our time and do it right.

That is, of course, ridiculous. You get the site back up and stop losing $BIGNUM. Once you've stopped the bleeding, then you can go back and do things the right way.

The problem is it compares humans to wild animals. If you feed wild animals they'll see you as a food source and often expect you'll continue to feed them forever.

The question then is do you agree (certain) people are wild animals.

If so are you too not a wild animal and if not, what makes you special?

That kind of justification is absolutely what gets people to experiment with working people to death who are dying of starvation.

"We're giving the assistance too freely! Ah, maybe a little more work would be good for them, not me of course, but them, they are the ones not working hard enough, who are dependent, me? no I work hard for my money, that's why I get to decide who lives or dies because they are not working hard enough!"

What a steaming crock of shit.

The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.