I long for the days of personal responsibility (pre-FDR). Before the statists came into power, people would turn to their friends, neighbors or churches. Now it's the nanny state that provides for them.
While I certainly don't want to see anyone freeze to death during the upcoming winter, there was a time (in my lifetime, since I'm rather old and lived during the twilight of the aforementioned socialist president) when Americans would help Americans on an individual basis. Now, it's all socialism and bureaucrats.
I think people still do that for family and close friends. We have and folks have responded to us when we were in an emergency.
In small communities, paying taxes for such help is acceptable, IMO. There are always people who live soap opera lives and they existed back in the day, as well. They received government help, but it was commodities or access to an assistance fund. I remember when insurance agents kept a stash of cash to help someone who had a tough time and couldn’t make a premium payment. That was when you delivered the premium personally to the individual who sold you the policy. (Which gives you an idea of _my_ age!)
The churches get overwhelmed, these days. Besides the glaring real needs, there are grifters who go from church to church cadging handouts. I know pastors who have had to invoke tough love, after a while.
Emergencies are one thing, but being in perpetual need is wearing on everyone and, I assume, is horrid for many folks. Lots of times it is some woman who is living with a man who could care less and there are kids involved. Even family burns out in those cases.
We haven’t raised people to think or plan or understand that they need to be responsible for themselves. Morality has gone by the wayside and more and more, people just tune each other out and become hermits. We may all live in the same geographical area, but we aren’t real communities, such as I remember.
I don’t know the solution to all this. On an individual basis, you can get caught into a situation where you give again and again and all it accomplishes is a drain on the giver, because most of the recipients are not ever going to
change and just expect the giver to continue on. People even will resent those who help because the implied obligation can never be met. Perhaps the bureaucracy was developed so the charity could be more anonymous. I agree it has gotten out of hand.