Washington Will End Poverty This Time!

President Barack Obama is set to create a series of 'promise zones' aimed at ending poverty in certain very poor areas of the United States. How well that will work out remains anyone's guess, but the best guess is that it will not work very well at all.

Government will never solve the poverty issue. Nor, quite frankly will free market economics. But the latter has something on its side which the former lacks: actual, real incentives to work. It's the old teach a man to fish axiom, based on the assumption that he really wants to learn to fish.

Government assumes that all men want to learn to be self sufficient, and, of course, when asked, all men say that that's what they want. The trouble is they don't all actually want that.

Enter a free market, with the very simple incentive that if ya don't work ya don't eat. Government can't have that, because then the accolades for eradicating poverty fall on someone else rather than Big Brother. That just stings too much for any red blooded tax and spender to accept. They need to know that they have the answers. They must hold the solutions, not some amorphous market.

It's an ego trip, really. And Mr. Obama's ego, indeed the egos of all the save the world types, simply must have such stroking.