Ensuring financial services to poor people is best done by growing the quantity of financial institutions accessible to them, as well as by strengthening the limit of those institutions. It is difficult to distinguish microfinance from similar activities. It could be asserted that a government that orders state banks to open deposit accounts for poor consumers, or a moneylender that engages in usury, or a philanthropy that runs a calf pool are occupied with microfinance. The history of microfinancing can be followed back as far as the center of the 1800s, when the theorist Lysander Spooner was expounding on the benefits of small credits to entrepreneurs and farmers as a method for getting the people out of poverty. This specific model used by numerous Microfinance institutions makes financial sense, he says, because it reduces transaction costs. Microfinance programs also should be based on neighborhood funds.