You cannot force everyone to help you. You cannot force other people to help those you think most in need of help. To imagine that taking from some to give to others helps people, you’re really just taking from Peter to give to Paul, and shifting wealth to satisfy your own moralities.

“But I’m only taking from the rich! They can handle what I advocate they pay!”

Imagine someone poorer than you, however wealthy you may or may not be, taking money from you because they don’t believe you deserve what you have. We vehemently fight for what we feel we’ve earned, ourselves, but don’t trust that others possess the same right to their own earnings as we do to our own. Is there no disconnect for you? Are you missing the link?

Poverty is subjective. There is no universal constant by the American definition of poverty. We like to call whomever rests at the bottom of our particular ladder “poor,” despite most American “poor” still being richer than 99% of the rest of the world. Our poor have between one and two televisions in their home. That’s technically wealthier than most of the rest of the world. America, alone, owns 15% of the world’s televisions (another 22% by the Chinese), but that statistic is for one television per household. That doesn’t count that there is usually more than one TV, that one or both are color, or even having cable to hook up to it, too.

Our “poor,” however much in honest need, are still wealthier than most of the world is rich.

And yet, we call their plight so tragic that we advocate the use of force to take what honest people have earned to give to those who either will not or cannot. And while there are many who cannot, by what moral compass do we advocate theft to employ altruism? Is it so noble to take from some to give to others?

We advocate this theft under the guise of helping people, but giving people money who have no concept on how to manage it is worse than merely burning it. Keeping people fed is always a noble thing, but if all we really achieve is keeping them just motivated enough to stay exactly where they are, in exactly the same problems, hoping for the same empty solutions, addicted to the same false hope, then we keep them alive only as slaves, slaves to someone else’s shallow morality and faulty altruism.

And we perpetuate it, because on the surface such words of good intent seem real, but their true results prove their worthlessness, and we then allow appearances to continue the enslavement of others who really need the assistance of involvement, not money. They need people willing to bring them food, teach them how to manage what money they can earn themselves, and repeal laws altruism set in place to help but have served only to hinder.

Never mind the preposterous concept that to help a few you must enslave all. We are not ants, sheep or other purely collective animal. Every time some of us attempt to forcibly collect us in a society of high control, we buck. We fight back. We die on the inside before turning to flame and setting the world on fire. Look at the collectivism of Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, or Communist China. The people there die on the inside. Life loses its luster when we are treated like nothing more than cogs, subject entirely to the needs of the whole.

Benito Mussolini Hanging after the Italians took their country back

It comes through revolution most often that such collectivism is destroyed. People can’t stand it anymore. They explode, they fight back, they run. Even if they don’t know what else they should run to, they know what they should run from, and that is altruistic enslavement!

Involuntary slavery is wrong, no matter the purpose. Should I willingly give up the rights of my life to someone else, it will be by my choosing for my own calculated benefit. Like voluntary indenture, or the surrender of the soul to a God you believe in. But to another human being, as equally or moreso flawed? By what right should anyone declare ownership of my life to whom I have given no license?

You cannot force other people to help you, or to help others you believe in need of help. You are neither so noble nor so wise as to understand the breakings of the human soul and spirit that bring people to true poverty, for poverty has nothing to do with a lack of funds, and everything to do with a lack of capability, wrought not by some inadequacy of one genome over another, but the dealings deeper down, where man loses hope and stops looking for true opportunity.

If you want to help people, force no one but yourself off your couch and off your ass and out in the community, to teach, to guide, to share the true wealth in the heart and mind of man, that each may further himself, by his own strength, and to his own benefit, and the voluntary benefit of others, which in turn continues his own benefit, and thus blesses the lives of all.