How awesome is this: the Neatorama Alien, by Len Peralta of Monster by Mail. Len told me the story of how Monster by Mail came to be:
Monster By Mail was started as a way to make money to pay for the healthcare costs related to the birth of our daughter in the fall. Well, we are in the home stretch of the pregnancy over here. My wife is due next month and thanks to some poorly timed home emergencies (and necessities) over the course of the past few months (plumbing and pipes bursting, partial electrical rewiring in our home, a new van to cart around our soon to be six kids), I am still trying to save enough money to pay for the birth.
If you want your alien, you can get it here: Link - Thanks Len!
To answer your questions:
Welfare? No.
Food Stamps? No.
Food Banks? Not unless the money comes from voluntary donations, not tax dollars extracted under threat of prison. Lots of private charities run food banks and that's great. When governments *force* people to support others, that's not cool. Forcing people to work twice as hard to support slackers and moochers equals an absence of liberty.
You raise some good points in your second paragraph. Unfortunately, as you can see, there is inevitable subjectivity in deciding who is "deserving" and who is not. Libertarians like myself would prefer to pay our own bills and be responsible for financing our own healthcare, and saving for our own retirements. I am free to give to private charities (which I do) and I have great confidence they administer their dispursements to truly needy FAR better than a huge building full of government bureaucrats on high saleries and juicy lifetime benefits.
Inevitably, people who live on the dole grow lazy whilst those who have to get up early and look for work to feed their families are forever more productive members of society. The tremendous contributions American inventors made BEFORE the creeping socialialization in our country was a direct consequence of an essentially unlimited potential for success. At LEAST equally important was an absence of the dole / welfare / public assistance (whatever the least shameful term is these days). People worked hard or their kids went hungry. It sounds harsh, but honestly, the country's standard of living today (our "poor" are fat, with satellite TV and cell phones) is high today because of it. I won't even get into the myriad of medical advancements that took place because doctors and researchers weren't shackled under a government run health system that wouldn't let them reap the rewards of their own efforts...
S.T.F.S.
I wasn't suggesting that people who have lots of kids shouldn't be covered. I was just saying it was frustrating to know that your tax dollars were going toward supporting people who get pregnant over and over again (often by accident), can't afford the kids they already have, and end up using other taxpayer-funded services as well. If you can afford the kids, that's great. I'm not suggesting anyone be "cut off". It's just annoying. (I apologize to Len, here. I didn't mean to offend you, and I applaud your efforts to support your family. I am just kind of tired of seeing these sorts of things, whether it's fundraising by private citizens or shows like "Extreme Home Makeover" where they help people who've been devastated by medical bills. If everybody had some kind of medical insurance, raising all this money wouldn't be quite as necessary.)