Objections to welfare.
1) Welfare is not charity it’s theft.
Americans have always been free to donate as much of their money, time, or talent to worthwhile causes as they see fit. But when government uses the force of law to extract money from people who earned it and give it to someone else that’s not charity. Generosity with someone else’s money is not virtue. It’s theft. Politicians long ago realized that the government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul. As long as they craft their tax and welfare plans so that there are more Pauls than Peters they can keep getting elected. Our constitution would prevent this but it has been largely rendered inoperative.
2) Welfare breeds more welfare.
There is an old saying; “you get what you pay for.” In the case of welfare that holds true. If you pay people to stay home and have babies rather than work that’s what they will do, and they will do it in large numbers. The more babies they have the more they make, so they raise large families. Their children grow up believing that is a proper way of making a living and when they become adults they do the same thing. That causes the number of welfare cases to rise rapidly. As their population grows, so does their political power. They are able to elect politicians who will give them more goodies at the expense of the taxpayers.
3) The welfare state puts a burden on the productive members of society.
As an example if you are poor you may be entitled to Medicaid to cover your medical expenses and you don’t pay for it. But if you work for a living your tax dollars pay for the system, but you can’t collect any benefits from it. You have to fund your healthcare some other way. It makes the working people servants of the poor.
4) The welfare state defeats the free market forces that keep prices under control
Under Medicare and Medicaid, the people who receive the medical services are not the ones who pay for them. That creates a disconnect in the free market forces that normally keep prices down. Medicaid and Medicare were started about 40 years ago. Since then the cost of those two programs has grown 100 fold, far outstripping inflation. On the other hand, one medical treatment which is not covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or health insurance is vision correction surgery. It still operates in the free market. The result is that prices for that procedure have actually fallen from about $3000 per eye 15 years ago to under $1000 per eye today.
Good points. I would also expand on your implied point about welfare undermining political instability.
Today, we have an excessive emphasis on rights, and often fail to recognize that rights impose responsibilities. One of the responsibilities of self-government is self-support.
Democracies/republics are implicitly founded on the notion that the vast majority of people are self-supporting and self-sustaining. Because one's vote is equal regardless of level of contribution to society, or lack thereof, if those who are net non-contributors to society become a majority, self-government is severely jeopardized, since those who produce the nation's wealth will abandon democracy if it means that they are having the fruits of their labor stripped from them by a non-producing majority.
That's why anthing beyond a very limited welfare state is very dangerous.
