> Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum

Many people prefer that to working.

The Seattle Times wrote an article decades ago where they interviewed a woman on welfare. They asked her what she'd do if her welfare was taken away. She replied "get a job".

They asked a couple of guys in a car with fishing equipment why they lived on welfare instead of getting a job. They replied that on welfare, they get to fish all day and enjoyed it.

I also knew a fellow for years who was on and off unemployment. He said he'd work at a job long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he'd f'up and get laid off. He'd then live off of unemployment, and would fail the requierd job interviews (amazing!). When that ran out, he'd have no trouble finding a job.

A friend of mine ran a nursery. He tried to hire a couple people who said they wanted the job, but would wait until their unemployment ran out before taking it. They were quite open about it.

Not that "absurd" at all.

> Many people prefer that to working.

Hence why I said "virtually", having a few anecdotes from interviews or from someone you knew doesn't cover it. Of course there will be people who choose to live on welfare, the vast majority would rather not. It's a small price to pay to have welfare programs saving countless lives from falling deeper into the hole of abject poverty... We just view this very differently, you prefer the "stick" approach, punish people who you deem unworthy because of their lack of motivation to work; while me on the other hand prefer the "carrot" where I think it's an okay price to pay to have some people choosing to not to work while society can protect people caught in bad times from falling away from the margins.

It's still absurd the straw man you created, please provide me data covering the whole population and we can discuss it, while it's based on these anecdotes you just being guided by your feelings and ideology.

If I can personally run across such people, friends of mine run across them, the reporter has no trouble finding them, then it isn't rare.

> punish people

It's not about punishing people or whacking them with a stick. It's about paying people to fail.

There's also nothing wrong with you, me, or anybody else freely helping those who you, me, or others deem to be in need.

Making people work is an assumption that work in itself is valuable, or at worse, mostly valuable. This isn't necessarily the case for jobs, and some jobs are probably actually detrimental to the well being of our society.

If you're willing to pay someone to do a job for you, then you have implicitly deemed it to be valuable.