Welfare helps poor people in need and the last thing we need to do is put people out on the streets who need help the most. Most poor people are children and I think they deserve the basic necessities of life and therefore the government should help them. They deserve food, clothing, and basic shelter.

How could anybody be opposed to something as moral as helping the poor?
 

I can't help but feel this is a trap.

Regardless, it's quite simple. Welfare was a function of private entities for thousands of years. Only during the last half of the 20th century did it become a government responsibility (in the U.S.)

Welfare should be a product of free will, not coercion.
 

And look how that turned out, do we want to go back to the masters and slaves, lords and serfs days?

If you agree that we should help those in need then you should support welfare.
 

The way it is now, the system is broken. if you're a single person struggling to get by, you get nothing; but if you crank out a litter of kids, the government rewards you with money. This is ass-backwards. They should be giving incentives for people to be sterilized and not have kids. Also the benefits should have a timetable and require that you actively seek employment like unemployment benefits do. They shouldn't deduct 100% of what you make from what they give you, as that is a disincentive to find work when you can just sit on your ass and game the system.
 

So what if the system has it's flaws, we should be helping people!
 

Awwww.... did TH feel a pang of humanity after the fire? How cute.

The purpose of the welfare state was never intended to help people it was intended to indenture them to the government. Thus, it should be abolished.
 

The fundamental problem with welfare is that it does not teach the human being the appropriate behaviour in order to achieve a certain end, in this case, the sustainability of providing basic needs.

The great problems of welfare is its promotion of "unearned" ends. This results in broken individuals who are incapable of providing for themselves, something that is uniquely required by all human beings to survive within material reality.

Welfare then ensures pure dependence and can never be a backdrop against momentary hardship. It causes the human to progressively abandon a lifestyle of "earning" in favour of a lifestyle of "unearning." The long-term effects on the human psyche are catastrophic and typically irreparable, hence the constant increases in the amount of welfare distributed and those receiving it. The long-term effects of this policy are of course similar to things like Rome, where a small minority of the productive population (the "earned") end up supporting a mass welfare population (the "unearned").
 

Who cares if it doesn't work the way it's intended? We should be helping people!
 

The greatest problem with the welfare system isn't internal, it's external. Once, the welfare state was just a way for the average man to survive between jobs, no more than that. Unfortunately, there are now fewer jobs than there are people to fill them, and so the welfare system has gone from being a crutch to being a wheelchair, and unless employment increases it will continue being a wheelchair.
 

Yeah, no.