The Left has this Utopian dream for us.  Although it has been tried time and  time again and always failed, they refuse to let it go.  We will all live blissfully with all our needs taken care of by a benevolent government.  All those who want a job will have a job plus a nice place to live and healthcare insurance and college, all paid for by someone else. With all our needs taken care of , there will be no reason for war, and we all will live happily ever after.

The only problem with Utopia is human nature…..and money.  Has the Left considered that not everyone wants the same things?  What would make one person blissfully happy might make someone else miserable.  Some love living in an apartment and taking public transportation, others love gardening in their yard, swimming in their own pool and having lots of pets.  Some love open space and their nearest neighbor at least two miles away.  Others live to hunt, or camp, or climb mountains, or explore caves. The United Nations Agenda 21 Utopian plan (that we signed and have been moving forward for the last 20 years) calls for all people to live in apartment buildings along transportation corridors.  Private ownership of property is considered unfair, because not everyone can afford to own a home.  And, since owning property is the greatest source of wealth, the government will take over all property and provide you with a place to live. There will be no privately owned cars and we will all use public transportation.  We will live and work in the same neighborhood just like China.  Are you feeling blissful yet?

Of course, the Left thinks Utopia hasn’t worked before because their guy wasn’t in charge.  But now he is, so let’s look at the Left’s idea of Utopia, because since their guy was elected, they’ve been showing us what they want.  There will be no discrimination, because they are passing laws against “hate speech”.  If speaking of your concerns about a lifestyle or choice is considered “hate speech”, we won’t be doing that.  San Antonio passed a law against any city employee or anyone contracting with the city, having any anti-gay opinions.  That wouldn’t be considered censorship, would it? They will control what you eat ~for your own good, of course.  No salt, no sugar, no soda’s, no “junk food”.  They will make everything “fair”~at least their idea of fair.  They want income equality.  Those who have worked hard and played by the rules need to have their income redistributed to those who dropped out of school and sat on their lazy asses.  Ah, yes, that is fair.

They don’t want anyone to feel shame or be “judged”, so there will be no public disapproval of…….well, anything.  No moral compass to guide us.  In the name of separation of church and state there will be no religious, symbols, sayings, quotes, or songs ever in public.  Ever. No religious holidays either.  Those might offend someone.  That is another thing that will be outlawed:  no one will be allowed to offend anyone else, even if that was not the intent.  They have been wanting to bring back the “fairness doctrine” that would shut down talk radio, as it did in the past.  If we are to have Utopia, we can’t have opposing opinions, can we? 

But we will have free education from pre-school through college, free birth control, free healthcare.  But, hmm, let me ask.  If the government is going to provide a place to live, food, healthcare, public transportation, etc. to everyone,  whether they work or not, why would anyone work?  I think that is what Greece is facing right now.

In the Left’s Utopia, they will defend a woman’s right to choose….to kill her baby up to and including the date of birth…..but if she chooses to keep her baby, they deny her the right to choose the school to which to this child must go.  While claiming to be the champions of choice, they deny us the choice of which light bulb to use.  They mandate a “low flow” toilet that you have to flush three times.  They mandate these lovely new washing machines that stink because they don’t use enough water to rinse out the dirt.  Funny, I had a washing machine for 20 years that never stunk.

In Utopia, our children will be educated according to Common Core, which will teach them how to be good little socialist citizens of the world.  As Michelle Obama said, “…we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we are going to have to change our traditions; our history; we are going to have to move into a different place as a nation.”  The Left has been changing our history books for many years, but in Utopia history will be changed completely, to support the Left’s agenda.  Can’t have children knowing what our country was founded on, or why.  Data will be collected on our children, and their lives will be guided by the government, not parents.  After all, the Left has already told us our children don’t belong to us ~ they belong to the collective.  I wonder what would have happened to Dr. Ben Carson if his future had been planned by government by the time he was seven.

Are you feeling blissful yet?  All our needs met, no discrimination, no one offended, no messy disagreements.  May I ask, who are these “angels” who are going to decide what is best for us?  Will their decisions be based on what is truly best for us, or on their own desire to control what we do?  After all, their blueprint for Utopia is Agenda 21.  For all intents and purposes, it puts us in “human habitats” and gives animals free reign of the land.  Is it really best for us to have our use of energy restricted?  What does that do to the economy?  Remember Obama said, “We can’t drive our SUV’s and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…..and then just expect [that] other countries are going to say OK”. 

Utopia has never worked, and it never will.  There isn’t enough money for it to work, and in spite of what the “elites” think, people would not be better off or happier.  In spite of what they think, they aren’t any smarter than we are.  They don’t know better than us how we want to live our lives.  Look at some examples of Utopia, the USSR, Nazi Germany, Cuba, to name a few.  The “elites” lived lavishly, while everyone else lived in poverty…..and those who opposed the government, died.  Do you think an American Utopia would be different?  Look at how Obama lives.  He thinks nothing of sending Air Force One to pick up his dog.  He and Michelle take separate planes on lavish trips paid for by taxpayers.  Look at how rich our representatives become after getting elected.  Look at Al Gore, living in a house that uses more electricity than the average city,  being chauffeured around in a limousine, flying his private plane around the world telling us we have to live with less.  

The Utopia the Left dreams of is for them, not us.  They will control jobs, the economy, banks, schools, and entertainment.  They will decide how we live, where we live, what we eat, and what we learn.  They will deny the rest of us any chance of improving our lives,  and will keep us from living as they do.  Feeling blissful now?

Here's a fact that every one of us should understand and keep at the ready, in every debate on the issue of prosperity vs. poverty:
 
The groups typically labeled "the poor" and "the rich" are not static.
 
Please read that again and remember it.
 
The collectivist Left typically - and usually without challenge - speak as if income level is an immutable condition, that we're either born "poor" or born "rich," and that is where we stay for life.  The facts of reality expose this as another collectivist fraud, passed off mostly on the strength of its never being questioned.
 
There are always people who are poor, there are always people who are rich, and there are always people who fall somewhere between.  But here's the fact the Left do not want known: 
 
The individual people who comprise those groups rarely stay put, especially people who start out as members of "the poor."
 
Assuming even a semi-free economy, people invariably move upward in income and in their consequent standard of living.  And of course there is no guarantee that someone who has achieved wealth will stay wealthy (wealthy people can and do sometimes lose their shirts and fall out of the upper income groups.) At any given time, and assuming a relatively-constant level of government meddling with the economy, the percentages of people comprising the different income groups remain constant - but the specific people that comprise a given group, including the poorest quintile, are moving through it constantly, generally in an upward direction. The total quantities of people within those groups themselves remain constant despite the fact of people leaving them for higher ones, because people new to the job market constantly emerge to replace those who move up,   For example, a recent college grad on his or her first entry-level job may be working at an income level that classifies that person as "poor" - until skill, effort and gained experience enable him to make more; the same is true of immigrant laborers - who are an asset, not a drain on the economy, assuming they're employed rather than dependent on government assistance.
 
So...what is the most effective method of raising people out of poverty on a continual basis?  Is it the self-generated action of individuals exercising their effort, their creativity and initiative within a market that's left free enough for them to do so?  Or is it the government handing out freebies, as "entitlements" that one collects passively for no other reason than possessing a pulse, and which drain the vitality of the economy as a whole?
                         
History tells us that it is the former - economic liberty, a.k.a. capitalism - that "helps the poor," and only the former.  The simple reason is that economic opportunity and advancement are available to all people, but only in an economy that is left free by its government to thrive and grow.  Beyond that norm, charity can only come from surplus income earned by people who are... left free to earn.  If government steps in and forces people at gunpoint to endure crushing taxation for the sake of "anti-poverty" programs, the entire fabric of the economy is dragged into poverty, and all "help for the poor" - voluntary or forced alike - dries up along with that destroyed economy. 
              
- Up until 1981, forty-plus years of complete Democrat control of social policy in America caused multiple generations of welfare dependency and the most prosperous nation on Earth to get its clock cleaned by the Deming-schooled and relatively-free Japanese.  Democrat policies culminated in Jimmy Carter 1.0's disastrous experiment with Keynes and its consequent "malaise," "stagflation" and the like - essentially across-the-board impoverishment of the American people, and by extension, the world's people;
 
- Then came eight years of Reagan's baby-steps in the direction of laissez faire, which in the face of withering opposition as "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor," despite an expensive but necessary restoration of national defense as government's first priority (see the Declaration of Independence,) and his consequent defeat of the Soviet empire - launched both the American and world economies into a boom cycle, during which those who started out in the poorest income quintile profited most.  That "Reaganomics" boom cycle would last a full quarter-century, until...
 
- Un-jailed economic vandals Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Franklin Raines, Alan Greenspan, BillyBob Clinton, George Bush (both of them,) Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama (Jimmy 2.0,) Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and a few dozen minor others, brought it to a screeching halt, I'm thinking by conscious intent. So as to provide justification for... a full return to the same Marxian / Keynesian cancer that Reagan successfully treated between 1981 and 1988.
 
So what is the goal of "charity for the poor?"  Is it for the "giver" to feel self-satisfaction at his intentions regardless of effect, or is it to actually make a long-term difference in people's standard of living and thereby to eliminate dependence?  The old bromide "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," is fully valid and applicable - but not if your ideology and your very profession require a dependent class for you to "help."  In this sense the advocates of permanent welfare exhibit the same mentality as drug pushers - and occupy the exact same ethical status.
 
If the goal is to improve the standard of living of people who are poor, then the goal is to improve the standard of living of people who are poor. 
 
It is not to enrich the ruling class via transforming everybody else into a "ruled" class - which is clearly the goal of the newly-religious Left.
Isabel Paterson's 1943 work "The God of the Machine" is directly relevant to the context of motives and their practical effects in "helping the poor."  A notable excerpt:
http://www.panarchy.org/paterson/guillotine.html
 
Ayn Rand's broader analysis of the proper relationship between each individual and his own life, between each individual and every other individual, and between each individual and the government (which latter is just: a group of individuals,) is covered in two landmark 1963 articles that should be considered required reading prior to any discussion of wealth and poverty, and referred back to frequently:
 
"Man's Rights" -
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=arc_ayn_rand_man_rights
and "The Nature of Government" -
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_nature_of_government
 
Another useful reference, further analyzing the issue of income mobility vs. fixed statistics, is economist Thomas A. Garrett's 2010 article "U.S. Income Inequality: It’s Not So Bad" -
http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/itv/articles/?id=1920

Both theory and the empirical evidence of recent history tell us two things, loudly:
 
- The market, when the control-fetishists are compelled to leave it alone and individual rights are upheld and enforced, is entirely self-regulating and a vast benefit to people of every income level, especially those who start out poor. IOW, though it may sound counterintuitive, the best - arguably only - way to "help the poor" is to release the government's shackles from the economy and allow that market to do its stuff.  [Again, this is not a prescription those whose livelihoods require a dependent class - the Dependency-Dope Pushers - want to accept.]
 
- Government anti-poverty programs, to the degree to which they interfere with the natural, spontaneous function of the economy, impoverish not only the people they ostensibly are there to "help," but the whole of the economy upon which their, and everyone else's, livelihoods depend as well. Which makes such government "anti-poverty" schemes morally obscene.
 
If you doubt that Reagan's policies not only benefited people who started out poor but benefited them more than any other income group during the '80s decade, then consider the 1993 article "Gekko Echo" by economist Jeff Scott and philosopher David Kelley to be a mandatory bookmark and required reading. Its presentation is derived entirely from apolitical data from the Census Bureau and the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis, and its conclusions are the exact opposite of the "decade of greed" narrative, promoted ever since in collectivist media:
 
http://reason.com/archives/1993/02/01/gekko-echo              
              
Again, if the idea is to transform poverty to productivity to the extent of what is possible to human effort, rather than to enrich a ruling/taxing class, then both theory and history tell us that government programs are ethically monstrous - in outcome if not in intention - while economic liberty is an unqualified success, wherever and to whatever degree it is allowed to flourish.