Welfare or not?

I've often pondered whether social welfare is a good thing or not and how far we should go in either direction. I'll try and explain what I think are two good arguments for and against.

On the "against" side is the concept of personal liberty/rights and responsibility. This is the idea of freedom. Most people think freedom is a good thing. But if people were truly free then we wouldnt enforce taking money off someone to give to someone else (tax). It should be the choice of the indvidual whether they wish to help their fellow man or not. We shouldnt bleed the wealth creators of what they create, we should take responsibility to create our own wealth and trade with others. Being someone who pays more tax than many people earn I have an empathy for this position. Why shouldn't my trip around the sun cost the same as someone elses? One of the "thought experiments" I've heard for this is the concept of a bunch of people going for a meal. Normally everyone would think its fair everyone pays the same amount for their meal. But, lets imagine everyone had to pay based on their ability to pay. If we represented the entire country as 10 people going to this meal we would find that 1 person is compensating everyone elses meal (if not paying for other peoples entire meal). We also find that the 9 other people have a majority say in how much the 1 person has to pay to compensate their meal. This dosnt sound very fair. The danger is if the "1" person deciedes to go dine somewhere else then it will pretty much screw the 9 others who expect that 1 person to comepensate them so they don't have to pay the full cost for their own meals.

Now the argument "for". Capitlisim pretty much creates a bunch of unemployed people. It is bad for an economy to have 100% employment since then there won't be a labout market. No labour market pushes up costs of business (no competition causes people to ask more and more for their services) and then businesses collapse. So we can pretty much expect there are going to be people who won't be able to earn money. So our best bet is to look after the people who arn't working. We should provide as much education as possible so that we have a fantastic labour market providing us with the best possible people. We should make sure we look after the health of everyone to also protect the labour market. If we dont do this we wont be competitive as a whole and hence it will make it harder for everyone to create wealth. Pretty dry stuff huh? Or another angle, generally people are completely apathetic and while might have the best intentions to help their fellow man will never actually do it so if someone forces them to pay they might grizzle a little but generally wont mind unless it severly impacts their life.

*phew* what a waffle. So whats the answer to all this? Don't know...I suspect it might be along the lines from game "theory" (and the movie a beautiful mind) where we have Nash's Equilibrium theory. This basically states that we have equlibrium when all parties can't increase their benefit without decreasing the benefit to the other parties. Or basically that everyone wins. This does mean that some might not win as well as they could have, but it would of been at the cost of a loss for someone else.