Exactly. Assistentialism is easy to defend, hard to attack ("you mean you should NOT help them?"), and spreads very easily, but totally fails to help, most of t

Exactly. Assistentialism is easy to defend, hard to attack ("you mean you should NOT help them?"), and spreads very easily, but totally fails to help, most of the time. A government shouldn't build hospitals for the poor, or schools for the poor in the same sense it shouldn't have buses with separate benches for black people ("affirmative action" programs face the same problem). It a big problem of democracy as a form of government that it encourages "for show", high-visibility/low-impact, governing, and assistentialism and affirmative action fit the bill perfectly. Most rulers are not trying to help the poor, but to show that they are helping the poor. Back where I com from, a few decades ago, there was a system of informal government called "coronelism". Affluent farmers or city politicians, called "coronéis", would build informal support networks around themselves (paying for a bright poor kid's education here, paying for a poor woman's surgery there, etc), and make it so that for most poor people they were the only way into having access to basic services of civilization. It was a crooked incentives game, and they elected themselves like this while laundering taxpayer money and sabotaging any sort of project that would provide real education, health care, etc, to the poor people, as a form of keeping control. The rest of the country needed to move forward a lot before this could be suplanted. I feel most affirmative action programs work in the same way. You can't criticise hospitals or housing for poor people in the same way you can't criticise the "coronel" for putting that bright poor kid through college and making a lawyer/doctor/engineer out of him, but neither of these actions actually change anything in the scale of society in the long term.