The pull yourself up by your bootstraps rubbish

Those IPOCs who prattle on about people lifting themselves by their bootstraps are like people who get in a car that has been provided, serviced and fuelled by others, turn the key to start the engines, then yells out the window at the car-less pedestrians "see, it's easy, all you have to do is turn the key - why don't you turn the key?" 

Without exception, my experience of such people is that they are clueless about many things in life - especially other nations' situations, extreme poverty, and their own unearned advantage (i.e., privilege) - which they regard as a fish does water. 

Another way of putting this, after visualising someone leaning over and hauling on their bootstraps (the loops at the back of boots to help get boots on), is that they have a cartoonish understanding of gravity, if gravity was life. 

In fact, the association with doing something impossible was the original meaning of this phrase.