Again, it all boils down to the ideals and values that you yourself hold dear - how you would wish to be treated and how you treat others, how you view your society, your country and it's people collectively and how or what you are willing to do for it's health and prosperity. There are those that live by the word 'me' and others who prefer to work toward 'we'.
Let's not confuse a social program with pure socialism and lets not link socialism to communism. The USA is for the most part both socialist and capitalist. Capitalism is without a doubt a cause of the cycle of poverty since it requires a substantial number of poor who will work for a business or corporation at the lowest rate possible, in order to achieve maximum profit at the top. The lower the rate of pay, the greater the profit and while a corporation should be entitled to a fair and equitable profit, the balance of what is fair and equitable becomes lost when that profit, fed by an elitist sense of entitlement and greed, exceed the norm by 500% and is paid to the CEO who just laid off half the company workforce, in the form of a bonus of $12 billion. I see nothing fair and equitable about that. When some major airline filed bankruptcy, the guys at the top lost nothing but the pension that the employee had paid into for years, was lost, leaving the majority with no savings in retirement. The law clearly penalizes those at the bottom and favours those at the top.
We can scream about entitlement or welfare - but in reality the amount of corporate welfare, in the form of tax breaks, far exceeds much of money we put into social programs for the needy. Bank of America is taking over Countrywide Mortgage. They will take the losses Countrywide has and then write those losses off as tax credits of about 270 million - and it's the taxpayer that will eventually foot that bill. If the USA were truly a well fed deregulated, capitalist, free market society, then the government should not have funnelled billions upon billions of dollars into that system and instead, losses should have been incurred by all who invested. This would have allowed the market to stabalize on it's own. We scream at those using social welfare but when we see our monetary investments losing ground, we most certainly hold out our hand for corporate welfare aka. government money, to fix the problem. In the end, everyone ends up paying. The money that the government paid to keep the banks solvent, to keep we, the investors happy, might just be paid back by that kid whose mother was on welfare at one time. Full circle.
I believe that a great society is one where we all contribute for the greatest good. Business and people alike. A society where we all contribute to ensure that our elderly, children and disabled are cared for and we all strive to end poverty in the wealthiest countries. We can do this by making sure that health care is universal, where education is affordable and mandatory, where we provide a liveable wage for people and not a substandard allottment initiated 30 years ago when costs were 500 times less than they are now. We should make people accountable and obligated for the children they bear and set standards with reasonable objectives within our social assistance programs, so that nobody sees their circumstance as endless but instead are motivated by ability.
I heard someone just lately, refer to a family they know as 'white trash'. When a society engages in labelling their own citizens as garbage, one can only assume that they have successfully beaten those same pieces of garbage so far down in the landfill, that it may take them years to ever get out - if they ever do. Sometimes people don't have even a bootstrap to use to pull themselves up with..sammieswife.