Welfare is Socialism Lite.

Socialism, in whatever brew, is the enemy of freedom.

If the tax-payers’ money spent by government on welfare were to be  … switched, say, to …

We are tempted to say “to the military”, because it is merry sport to bait the Left.

But to be sober about the matter: if it wasn’t confiscated from the people in the first place, if there were no government welfare programs, government would be much smaller and the people would be more prosperous.

Among President Trump’s many achievements in his first fifteen months in office, working continually against spiteful harassment and every kind of impediment the Left can devise, is a reduction of welfare provision. Not a huge reduction, no, but a change  in the right direction.

Investor’s Business Daily reports:

Earlier this month [April, 2018], the government reported that enrollment in food stamps plunged by nearly 600,000 in one month. Is this part of a broader trend toward greater self-reliance?

The Department of Agriculture, which runs the food stamp program — officially called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — reports that enrollment in January was 40.7 million, the lowest it’s been since May 2010.

In the months since President Trump has been in office, the number of people collecting food stamps plunged by nearly 2 million.

The same is true for welfare. Enrollment in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program dropped 12% last year, to reach 2.3 million.

Better still, the number of workers on Social Security Disability Insurance was down to 8.6 million in March — a decline of more than 100,000 since January 2017, and the lowest level since February 2012.

So far this year, disability applications have averaged 179,000 a month, compared with more than 193,000 a month in 2016. And the number of people dropping off disability rolls is up. Even enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP — the health care program for the poor and children — dropped by almost a million in 2017, to 74 million. …

In other words, millions of people are now free from at least some of their dependence on federal benefit programs. …

The best measure of success for any poverty program is for enrollment to keep trending toward zero.

Here’s Milton Friedman speaking, way back in 1976, about what is wrong with the provision of welfare by the state. You will notice he uses words that political correctness has since eliminated from public discourse. But the points he makes are still valid.

And here he is again on the same subject in another extract from the same source: