The problem with these ideas is that they're never going to be provable one way or another, so they remain convenient for those that want to believe them without ever really testing their true objective nature. Yes, there will always be SOME people who are taking the easy way out and living off welfare, blah blah blah. But the amount of people that actually have such a low self-esteem and drive that they are literally unwilling to do nothing is tiny compared to most people in low income situations, who work hard, long hours and just happen to be unskilled and uneducated enough to ever be good at something that will earn them more money. They're working full time, probably harder than you and me, they just get paid shit for it. And this number keeps rising since our economy shit the bed; the "welfare mother" stereotype becomes more and more a ridiculous fantasy of the 80's republicans with every passing year.
What's not a fantasy but a hard, provable fact, is the income distribution in this country. Here is a fascinating, hard-fact report on wealth distribution over the past several decades, based on pure numbers:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
you will note how clearly it shows that the bottom 80% have only 11% of the country's net worth, while the top 1% has over a third. And a hundred more fascinating statistics, such as the fact that the top 1% do not pay the highest percentage of their taxes as so many people would like to claim / think.
Regardless of whether you think this is "the way it should be" or not, the fact is, once enough people find themselves not getting enough, they're going to fight back. So for the good of everyone, including the rich and middle class, it is in their best interest to NOT hog the wealth; to create an economic system that keeps things balanced. I'm not advocating socialism. I'm simply telling you the reality of the situation. Free market, communism, whatever you want; the minute it stops meeting the needs of the people, that's the minute people start dismantling it.
