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 genuine picture from the United States, and two of the kids were in certainty sold into compelling subjugation, in which they were kept tied up in an animal dwellingplace and mishandled. This was in the 1940s.
Huge quantities of the general population who are poor are not fit for working. They are kids, the elderly, the physically and rationally incapacitated. They aren't in charge of their neediness, yet they're poor all the same. We can choose if it's OK to give them a chance to starve, or we can take care of them since it's the not too bad activity.
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