All Western-style democracies have welfare systems, which means that presumably the majority is interested in having a welfare system, despite that it is a financial net negative for most people (that is, most people pay more money in taxes for welfare than receive welfare, I think?) So, apparently most people care about the poor.
The poor and the not-poor aren’t completely distinct and disconnected groups. Few people are rich enough to be able to to absorb all the impacts of becoming unable to work, and many working people have non working relatives. State welfare can be seen as a way of insuring against the former, and spreading the cost of the latter. So there are selfish motivations, up to a point.
And it’s typical of insurance schemes that most subsribers are nett losers—that is hardly a bug. And the shear scale of state welfare, seen as insurance, is a rather desirable feature that is likely to go missing in the alternatives.
The poor and the not-poor aren’t completely distinct and disconnected groups. Few people are rich enough to be able to to absorb all the impacts of becoming unable to work, and many working people have non working relatives. State welfare can be seen as a way of insuring against the former, and spreading the cost of the latter. So there are selfish motivations, up to a point.
And it’s typical of insurance schemes that most subsribers are nett losers—that is hardly a bug. And the shear scale of state welfare, seen as insurance, is a rather desirable feature that is likely to go missing in the alternatives.
This is a valid point, however one can then ask why we have welfare rather than private insurance.
In some cases we do, althouth it needs to be mandatory to get enough people in. But mandatory insurance is only half a victory for libertarians,