I am not going to look at the necessity of redistribution of wealh as being essential to the well being of a nation, which includes welfare.  What I do want to look at here is welfare itself, and the question of whether or not a government run welfare system qualifying as compassion.  The norm for government run welfare is to take money from others via taxes (money people don't willingly give) and hand it over to a system with individuals who do the work as a job.  The system is impersonal, and based around doing the absolute minimum to try to placate a need, to silence those in need, and also to quiet the collective guilt of a nation that they have poor among them, or out of concerns that there is a need for a safety net.

So, can someone answer me here how exactly this system qualifies as compassion?  I bring this up, because whenever political ideologies are discussed, conservatives are told they are heartless, and lacking compassion, because they don't believe in having a system I described above.  So, thus, the system above must be a sign of compassion, right?

By the way, I will be doing two more posts on here, one for conservatives, and another for libertarians, to answer.  Figured I would try to be balanced.  Not sure who here is a statist, and believes in collectivism in both economics and life values or I could ask about that.

That's not welfare, that's government employment. Welfare is handing it over to individuals in which you get no production in return.

The problem with this system, is you take the liberty of one group, to care for another. Where is the compassion is stealing from a group of people your elected to represent?

Look, if I became president and found a way to feed/house millions of people without taking from others, I would love to do it. But as an elected official of the US Federal Government, I would have to take an oath to uphold the Constitution to all I represent. This means I am not allowed to take from people, regardless of how good of a cause I think it is. I just don't have that authority, just because I have the power.

No one who is not a Libertarian understands that. As soon as you do, you will become one.

It may be impersonal but it's a system that keeps people who would otherwise be on the streets or without food housed and fed. To take away the only things that allow people to live a decent life is, in my opinion, lacking compassion for those people.

Sure, welfare is abused by some, but it also is pretty much the only way many many people can live lives of a decent standard.

@Mafoo. Taxation isn't theft. Also I feel no need to uphold your constitution, therefore any understanding of its meaning wouldn't change my opinion.

How much in no-bid contracts and the annual Federal budget would you allocate to the military industrial complex? How much would you would you allocate to farmers in subsidies?

See, I graduated high school in a farming town in NE Oregon. Many of my classmates were the sons and daughters of wheat farmers who owned massive amounts of acreage. Due to the yearly fluctuation in wheat prices, these farmers got subsidies to either not grow on a portion of their land to keep prices stable and/or got directly subsidzied with taxpayer dollars during years when the worldwide price of wheat was low.

Coincidentally, these sons and daughters of wheat farmers drove around in new cars many of which were volvos and beamers. How is subsidizing farmers for not growing or for not getting the price on their crop they want different from giving money to a single mother who is incapable of getting a job due to a lack of education or discrimination?

Personally, I see both no-bid contracts, annual budget allocations to private sector firms conducting military research, and farm subsidies as welfare. Yes they are creating a product that is either essential (food) or assists in the defense of the country. However, they have not earned it by working for it. They earn it simply by the status of their field of work in the eyes of almost all conservatives.

Farmers and the military industrial complex gets vastly more in Federal taxpayer dollars every year than every local, county, state, and federal welfare program comprised into a single unit. Where is the outcry from the right about the welfare we are giving wealthier individuals and organizations?

The right knows that its support (in part) comes from farmers and big business. Proper Libertarians are (or at least should be) opposed to these things, but you must remember that Libertarians do not represent the right, even though their interests are merely overlapping momentarily in this election cycle

Well, bidding on something is not the problem. There are things you don't ask for a bid on, because you know only one company can do the work. Why ask people to spend millions of dollars on something, when you know it will mean nothing?

That said, 90% of the money we spend on military I would end. I would end both wars. I would also end farmers subsidies.

I would end federally funded education. I would end Social Security, I would end Welfare, I would end military buildup. If there is a need for military research (and in some areas, there is), I would continue to fund it.

If there is no military need for NASA, I would end it.

I would aslo submit to repeal the 16th amendment (federal income tax).

I would put our money back on some standard, so a dollar has real value.

I would remove 95% of all the laws the federal government has made. I would remove laws that make drugs illegal, gives tax breaks to people who have kids, tax breaks to home ownership (this is where the federal government should collect it's money).

The Constitution was a document designed to limit what the federal government could put there hands in. Today, they tell you what you can eat, what you can drive, what you can wear, what your allowed to live in, what kind of medical care you must have, and something about every faset of your life. This is not what the federal government was put in place to do.

The things I want to change, 120 years ago, was the way things were. It's not crazy talk. Over the last 100 years the US Federal government has used its power to take control over everything.

Do you think we are better off for it? I sure as hell don't

And this is why we will never agree on anything. I am one who wants rules that government officials are elected to uphold. You want a government where the elected officials make the rules.

Freedom isn't for everyone.

Rath is a Kiwi (like you're soon to be), which is why he doesn't care about the governing document of a foreign nation

And you must remember that your view on the Constitution was not the reason the Constitution was put into place in the first place. We have a Federal Constitution so that we can have effective central federal government. We have a Bill of Rights to limit government, but the Constitution is there to empower it (as the Federalist party contended long ago)

Welfare doesnt just take from the Wealthy and give to the poor, my mom, a lowly paid and highly scrutinized public school teacher, is always griping about having to pay for people who refuse to work and go as far as pretending to be mentally disabled. Personally, I think the whole system needs to be redone. Government should only help people who wanna help themselves, or cant. I aslo think we spend way too much on the military. Conservatives always gripe about Liberals spending wastefully, but support two costly wars and have no qualms about giving the Military trillions of dollars to build weapons that won't improve our economy.

Welfare is actually meant to be an investment, funnily enough. It is supposed to be an investment in the human capital of a nation. One of the problems of any large society is that the people who are most likely to have children are the people most likely to screw their lives without assistance from the government. The only way to prevent that would be to curtail personal liberties, ala China because unfortunately those best able to raise the next generation are those least willing to do the work.