Congratulations, you've just won the elections and have been named prime minister of the democratic nation of Smallland (somewhere on the west coast of Noplace). After accepting your hat of office in a modest ceremony, your seasoned president recommends that you start working on next year's budget.
Luckily for you, Smallland is indeed small, and you have an annual budget of $22,000. Likely candidates for a slice of the money pie are Richard the teacher, upon whom depends the future generation, and Brad the mad, who suffers from crippling mental disabilities and therefore can't work and needs the country to buy his food, medicine, TV, and other such necessities. What are you, the freshly sworn prime minister, going to do?
This is an obvious oversimplification of a very real issue. You always have the old, the sick, and the terminally lazy, who cannot earn their own money, and in modern times, for some reason, they are fully entitled to receive some amount of money from their country. But money, even though most of it is virtual nowadays, is still a finite resource; every penny you choose to give Brad up there will be taken away from Richard who not only works for it, but is using this money to do an important job and create a better tomorrow.
The money is short enough as it is; not only does Richard complain often that this tiny budget is not enough to buy textbooks for all his students, but he frequently has to argue with other factions who need their own funding such as Roger the soldier who defends the national border (all 27 meters of it). Additionally, the budget is always trying to shrink, because Eric the cleric considers himself too holy to pay taxes.
Yes, these taxes are very much a part of the budget discussion. After all, a country is a completely ethereal entity; it's not a person who shows up in the corn fields every morning and at the end of the month receives a sparkly paycheck. A country has no income of its own, and every penny that it spends is a penny that was earned by one of its citizens via actual work.
Which means that the question of social welfare boils down to: how much money are you willing to take away from people who worked hard for it, and give to a third party which is guaranteed to use it to produce absolutely nothing?
Let's consider merely the old people, because the numbers are easy to come by: over 12% of the USA's population is 65+ years old, in France it's over 16%, and in Germany it's over 20%. Suppose you give each of these poor souls a mere minimum wage from the country's coffers; even that would immediately drain a ridiculous number of billions of whatever your local currency is.
These billions could pay teachers and doctors, they could build roads and bridges and houses, they could research a cure for cancer, they could do a great many things, and none of things is as useless as simply giving the money away to an ever-growing group of people defined by being unable to produce anything in return.
Because the problem won't end with this year's budget. The elderly slice of the population is growing at a steady pace, and a smaller and smaller part of the population actually pays those taxes that are supposed to do all of the above work. Agreeing to give a certain amount of money this year will make each old person expect a similar amount next year, but the number of people who expect this money is growing much faster than the actual budget, which means that either the salary-for-nothing they've grown to depend on will shrink and dwindle, or the amount of money that goes towards productive ends will.
Clarification #1: I have no problem with charity. A person has the right to give some of his money to people he cares about, should they become unable to provide for themselves. But this is not something that should be made compulsory by using a country's budget and drawing out of the people's taxes.
Clarification #2: Plenty of people could work if only welfare money wasn't discouraging them from it. There are many jobs that require only a working brain, and can be performed by any cripple, especially in the age of the internet. There are many jobs that don't require the spryness of a 20 years old youth and can allow the elderly to earn their keep. Maybe countries interested in social welfare would do well to match jobs to potential employees instead of sending people on a lifelong paid vacation.
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