Why do poor people deserve welfare benefits?

We don’t provide welfare because people deserve it; that isn’t the point. We provide them because that’s the kind of society we want to have. Without them, we’re back to finding orphans frozen to death on the streets on winter mornings, and people begging in rags, and children being put to work so as to earn enough to pay for their own food. All the lovely features of pre-welfare Victorian society.

This is a real picture from the United States, and two of the children were in fact sold into effective slavery, in which they were kept chained up in a barn and abused. This was in the 1940s.

Large numbers of the people who are poor are not capable of working. They are children, the elderly, the physically and mentally disabled. They aren’t responsible for their poverty, but they’re poor all the same. We can decide if it’s OK to let them starve, or we can choose to look after them because it’s the decent thing to do.

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