The Elder LifeCare Foundation provides grant opportunities and funds directly and indirectly to business entities, research groups and others to perform tasks that support and defend the Elder LifeCare Foundation agenda and mission, teaching quality of life skills to aging people by encouraging striving behaviors that lead to outcomes of thriving and enhanced livelihood. The core of the ELF vision is that America, by viewing aging as a series of prescribed milestones, sets up the obnoxious circumstances for government to define what happens to us, when it happens and who is in charge. The process of aging ties the lives of American citizens to a series of arbitrary expectations that through a century of propaganda and conditioning have become beyond individual control. In fact, citizens, whose capacity for critical and independent thinking and action has been lost, are now compliant. With mindless obedience, we have succumbed to accept the worst notions of quality of life, those that prepare us to abandon our striving in favor of government enforced outcomes of accepting dependency and entitlements in our later years. And we have even been convinced that the government has the right to confiscate the fruits of our livelihood to pay for it.(See - Words from our Founders)

Karl Marx was an astute observer of political tyranny over human incentive. His suave appeal was, in fact, to promise an end to incentive based, goal seeking, and striving behavior. As the socialist system unfolds, it conveys absolute power to a class of privileged politicians and supporters while destroying the personal initiative of its people. It gains its authority by slow force and confiscation of rights, property and assets. Social, industrial and economic role models are marginalized to a point of incapacitation. People become ruled by the power of threats and surveillance. Ultimately, the citizens come to behave as dependents, trusting and accepting in a state of confused anxiety and depression. Does this begin to sound like America's aging citizens?

Disregard for the lessons of mankind and human history is socialism's greatest flaw.

As we have seen from the experience of socialism, the power of forceful, planned and systematic behavior manipulation and controls over people's lives can deliver evil consequences in the wrong hands. The founding fathers realized the potential dangers of an all-powerful government that could threaten the loss of self-determination and individual incentive. In fact, the constitution was specifically designed to avoid the circumstances of government control over human incentive.

What is clear about quality of life is that from the beginning of human history, thriving, which results in observable circumstances of livelihood (tangible outcomes that sustain existence), is at the core of life itself. The behavior essential to the needs of survival of all species is the circumstance of "striving". When we stop striving, we are ready to die. Striving is a measurable and observable behavior that can easily be manipulated. Control placed in the wrong hands can force our natural proclivities towards striving to yield to a harmful paradigm with consequences extremely deletarious to sustaining quality of life. In fact, social change in the 20th century has caused a new social model where human life is defined by milestone expectations based on dependency and entitlements.

The founding fathers had a firm understanding of the nature and value of unfettered striving. They saw the value of individual incentive as a necessity to power the human capacity for opportunity, advancement, emotional well-being and ultimate fulfillment. Striving behavior is constantly aimed at achieving greater fulfillment and more easily sustainable livelihood. By encouraging competition, striving develops resourcefulness, creative solutions and incentive pathways for others to follow.

As much as our current political system is designed to obfuscate and confuse us, the lesson about quality of life and aging is really simple. Human fulfillment is not tied to arbitrary age determinants, but to individual readiness and ability to strive. And when we strive successfully, we thrive.

The most damaging outcome of political manipulation is the social welfare propaganda that is driven by a contrived and unrealistic notion of equality. Through its attempts at social engineering, it creates the universal expectation that we will achieve happiness and equal outcomes. Judging from the results of the entitlement experiments, this system has markedly increased dependency, lowered personal expectations and has caused a rise of negative emotional consequences that include apathy, depression, anxiety and stress. Any notion that socialism enhances quality of life is obviously propaganda driven either by forces that are naïve or political opportunism.

What bothers social planners the most is a hard to resist fact about quality of life. By the very nature of competitive striving, there will always be winners and losers. Sustaining life consistently results in casualties. Flawed attempts to equalize the outcomes of livelihood create a result contrary to happiness and fulfillment.

Age determined social expectations and milestones supress the vital elements of quality of life that necessarily include individual initiative, self-reliance and self-determination. Socially progressive politicians and their propaganda driven constituents are the winners, the rest of us losers. (See Entitlements and Depression)

The more social and legal pressure attempts to force humans to abdicate control over their personal lives in favor of arbitrary compliance, the more individuals find ways to resist. Take away enough incentive and people learn alternative pathways to escape and avoid threats to their livelihood.

Through collaboration and focused commitment to an honest dream of quality of life, Elder LifeCare Foundation will have the power to restore the circumstances that allow us to freely engage in competitive striving.

The Elder LifeCare Foundation firmly believes that the vision must guide all funded initiatives, elder care solutions, public policy issues and research. To the future of generations of aging people, the foundation's mission is too important to be compromised by the threat of deviations from the vision. Patent protections have been extended to the Elder LifeCare Foundation to ensure that the vision will remain safely focused on quality of life as a consequence of valuing individual freedom and incentive based behavior. ELF must have the power to oversee the compliance of funded initiatives to the letter of the vision.