Helping people is great. The idea of welfare derives in part from the belief that helping people is great AND that people who appear like help will help them will be positively affected by help.

The issue is that being positively affected by help is not the same as looking like you would be positively affected by help. Therefore, when it comes to helping people, it is HARD to know exactly how to do it. It takes a bunch of know-how, a bunch of trial and error. Essentially, it takes the very thing that markets of freely choosing people do.

The failure of welfare -- and it is a wide and severe failure -- can probably mostly be attributed to the fact that it's government provided. As usual, if you think that helping people that could use help is a good idea (which it is), the last thing you want is for government to be involved.