Poverty, homelessness, and a minimum wage hike.

 

Poverty Is Engineered. Not Earned. And the System’s Not Broken—It’s Functioning Exactly as Designed.

Let’s cut the crap:

You don’t get mass poverty in a land of abundance by accident.

You get it when power consolidates, markets are rigged, and freedom is selectively applied—then repackaged as virtue.

People aren’t failing. The system is designed to keep most people just busy enough, broke enough, and dependent enough not to revolt.

Homelessness isn’t a failure of personal responsibility. It’s a consequence of artificial scarcity.

There are more empty homes than unhoused people in the U.S.

Let that sink in: we already have enough. But access is locked behind inflated prices, bureaucratic red tape, and predatory investment schemes.

This is manufactured scarcity—and government interference pours gasoline on it.

• Zoning laws restrict multi-family housing and affordable units to protect the “character” of neighborhoods (read: NIMBYism and property values).
• Permit regimes slow down or outright block community-led housing solutions.
• Eminent domain is used to benefit developers, not the displaced.
• Anti-camping laws criminalize sleeping outside when there’s literally nowhere else to go.

This isn’t just unethical.

It’s anti-choice, anti-community, and anti-freedom.

True property rights do not mean infinite extraction at the cost of human survival.

They mean voluntary exchange, open access, and the right to participate in the market—not be excluded from it.

Minimum wage isn’t a solution. It’s a political bandaid on a gaping wound caused by state distortion.

Let’s be real:

The labor market is not free.

You don’t have a “choice” when your alternatives are starvation, homelessness, or medical bankruptcy.

Why? Because the state:

• Inflates currency via the Fed, destroying real purchasing power.
• Forces employers and employees into rigid, tax-and-regulate employment relationships that favor large corporations.
• Licenses, audits, fines, and gatekeeps would-be entrepreneurs out of the market.
• Gives out billions in corporate subsidies that create an artificial advantage for massive conglomerates.

That’s not a free market.

That’s a rigged casino where the house always wins, and small players are lucky to break even.

In a truly free and voluntary market, labor would be scarce—because people would have the freedom and resources to walk away from bad jobs, start their own thing, or build cooperatives.

Employers would compete for workers instead of trapping them.

So yes, wages need to rise—but not because the state demands it. Because the market demands it.

Poverty persists because profit margins demand it.

The working poor are not some unfortunate oversight.

They’re the economic backbone of a coercive system built on just-in-time desperation.

People stay poor not because they’re irresponsible, but because they’re systemically denied the tools of wealth-building:

• Ownership.
• Autonomy.
• Capital access.
• Decentralized opportunity.

The state claims to “protect” these people while erecting every barrier imaginable to keep them from escaping dependence.

And when they ask for more? They’re told:

• “Just work harder.”
• “Budget better.”
• “Start a business.”

Cool. With what capital?

In what zoning district?

Using what licensing?

After paying how much in fees, taxes, and mandatory insurance?

If you need permission to survive, you are not free.

So what’s the voluntaryist solution?

1. End corporate welfare.

If your business model needs government handouts to survive, it’s not a business—it’s a taxpayer-funded parasite.

Let the market actually work by eliminating subsidies, sweetheart contracts, and bailout culture.

2. Tear down the barriers to entry.

Licensing laws, permit fees, arbitrary zoning—these aren’t protections. They’re protectionism.

Let people work, trade, and build wealth without needing a law degree and three LLCs to sell tacos or fix bikes.

3. Protect mutual aid and decentralized solutions.

Let churches feed the hungry without a permit.

Let neighborhoods crowdfund housing without a dozen compliance forms.

Let people solve problems peer-to-peer, without the state interfering unless harm is being done.

That’s real community.

4. Decriminalize poverty.

Stop arresting people for being visible while broke.

• Sleeping in a car? Illegal.
• Selling water bottles without a license? Illegal.
• Panhandling? Ticketed, fined, sometimes jailed.

That’s not justice. That’s oppression, marketed as “civic order.”

5. Privatize opportunity—not oppression.

Let people own their labor, their time, their homes, their choices.

Reject centralized power whether it’s in government or corporate form.

Voluntary exchange only works if both parties can walk away.

Right now? Most people can’t.

Want to end poverty? Then stop calling this a free market.

Because it’s not.

It’s a coercively managed economy designed to benefit insiders and punish independence.

Poverty ends when people are free to choose.

When systems don’t dictate survival.

When state violence isn’t the gatekeeper to opportunity.

Voluntaryism isn’t utopia.

It’s just the radical idea that people should be free to live, trade, build, and thrive—without being forced, taxed, or trapped.

So if you really care about ending poverty?

Burn the red tape. Not the people caught in it.