Government-caused poverty

The following are the ways by which government causes poverty:

• The police protect the lives and stolen property of the wealthy parasites, thus preventing natural Darwinian market regulation.
• Patents and copyrights ensure monopolies, and thus cause excessively high prices.
• Occupational licensing, such as for doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and lawyers, drastically reduces competition in those fields, thus causing excessively high prices.
• Red tape greatly slows economic activity, and especially harms the poor, who can not afford to hire people to handle the red tape.
• The FDA requires literally truckloads of red tape to get a new drug approved. This ensures that only a few large pharmaceutical companies can make and sell new drugs, which results in excessively high prices due to the lack of competition.
• A few state governments, worst of all that of California, have exorbitant fees for starting a limited liability company, thus reducing competition with the large established companies.
• Unnecessary and unpublicized legal technicalities, terminology, and other complexities create an artificial necessity for lawyers, who drain money.
• Zoning laws prevent non-rich people from establishing businesses, because they can not afford a parcel of industrial- or commercial- zoned land in addition to the parcel of residential-zoned land upon which they live.
• Property taxes drain money from the poor, and are conducive to homelessness. That is especially true of property tax that is based upon the total value of the real estate, as is currently the case, whereas a land value tax would be less harmful by comparison.
• Fines of a fixed monetary amount disproportionately harm the poor.
• Fixed minimum wages, which make no exemption for small businesses, harm poor start-up businesses, which can not even afford to pay the owner minimum wage, much less the employees.
• Sales taxes on groceries help to keep the poor poor. Many of the states use sales taxes, but most of them make an exception for food, or have greatly reduced sales taxes on food. The states with the highest sales taxes on food include Mississippi (7%), Idaho (6%), Tennessee (5.5%), and Kansas (5.3%). Pseudo-libertarians propose the Unfair Tax, which would increase these taxes to a whopping 30 percent.