According to the most recent findings, on a given night in January 2013, 610,042 Americans were homeless. From 2012 to 2013, homelessness did decline 3.7 percent and 31 states saw a fall in homelessness. However, 20 states saw an increase. And more people are on the verge of homelessness since poverty increased by 0.6 percent and households experiencing severe housing cost burdens increased by 0.7 percent.

Government anti-poverty efforts already crowd out private giving because of how those policies pervert incentives. Now local governments are taking it one step further by explicitly outlawing giving to the homeless, despite homelessness being a significant lingering problem for the US economy. 33 U.S. cities now ban or are considering banning the practice of sharing food with homeless people.

Some cities have reportedly started to fine, remove or threaten to throw in jail private groups that work to serve food to the needy instead of letting government-run services do the job. The justification for these bans is to prevent government-run anti-homelessness programs from being diluted.

The policy is not only completely backwards, it is simply cruel. It’s difficult to imagine the mindset of someone so obsessed with making government programs responsible for helping people that they propose using force to prevent anyone else from doing so. People often accuse anti-poverty programs of creating a culture where poor people are dependent on the government (which they do), but now we are starting to see policies that institutionalize that culture by force.

This new method of making criminals out of peaceful and charitable citizens is merely the latest in the long line of attacks in the war on the homeless.

Governments create poverty as we know it. They ratchet up costs of living and make it difficult to climb the economic ladder. They do this through arbitrary regulation, licensure requirements, protectionist trade policy, barriers to employment, inflation driven bubbles, urban renewal projects and more.

Author and activist, Charles Johnson, writes, “Government regimentation of land, housing, and labor creates and sustains the very structure of urban poverty … Government regulations create homelessness and artificially make it worse for the homeless by driving up housing costs and by obstructing or destroying any intermediate informal living solutions between renting an apartment and living on the street.”

In other words, government causes homelessness, then pretends to fix it with anti-poverty programs. Now it is making the plight of the homeless even more difficult by restricting their options and forcing them to rely on the government, rather than their family, friends, and communities. It seems that the government is no longer pretending to help the poor. They are explicitly coming out as against helping homeless people.

The war on homelessness is clearly escalating. Governments are ramping up their methods of creating homelessness and making the experience as miserable and tragic as possible. The only way to end homelessness is to get the government out of the picture. Remove the giant roadblock created by government intervention and allow free people to provide for themselves and others.

Instead of preventing families, friends, and communities from helping the homeless, they need to be encouraged to do so. Mutual aid networks, horizontal community efforts, and plain old charities would be a true war on poverty. Social cooperation and voluntary giving is the only cure. Not top-down, cruel laws like these.

King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”

The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.” In contrast, King noted that “[w]e are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished” and concluded that he is “now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a … guaranteed income.”

Market anarchists can fully agree with King that “[t]he dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain.” An antipoverty program that empowers ordinary people to run their own lives would be both more respectful and more effective than the top-down approach whose often-lauded, less-often-read bible “The Other America” referred unabashedly to the “Negro who must be patronized and taken care of like a child.” King approvingly quotes laissez-faire populist Henry George’s view that creative activity “is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities” and thus would be “enormously increased” in a post-poverty society.

A society-wide economic floor could, and should, be sustained by means consistent with free markets. Henry George’s single tax was the culmination of a line of classical liberal proposals to provide all members of society with a share of common natural resources. Self-sustaining voluntary organizations that pool members’ resources have an array of models to draw on, such as the Peace Mission Movement that made enough from nonprofit cooperative businesses to hold daily feasts during the Great Depression. And even a simple repeal of the countless legal barriers to subsistence would go a long way towards establishing a de facto floor. With a combination of such approaches, the abolition of poverty need not take another fifty years.