Actually, as a Christian, my thoughts about the care for the poor and needy have never really included a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I've always understood that care should come from the Church, not the state.
What bothers me is the idea of "tough-love" approach from the state (which I agree with) being used to justify the inaction of The Church (which I don't agree with). Believe me, as an expat living in England, I see daily the downside to modern socialism from a political standpoint. However, this cannot be used as blanket reasoning for the abondonment of the poor and needy by the Church.
Honestly, how much of capitalism's overriding priority to accumulate wealth would Jesus have honestly condoned? Which doesn't automatically mean that Jesus would have immedately embraced communism or socailsism either! Doesn't Scripture say if a man not work, then let him not eat? Nowhere in the Bible is laziness and sloth encouraged, however nowhere is financial profit and the accumulation of wealth held up as man's highest goal.
Unfortunalty, what happens is that whenever a Christian calls out for action for the poor, or for social justice, or expresses concern for *gasp* the environment, suddenly they get labled this flaming liberal who is obviously deceived by Satan needs to be delivered from the evil spirits of communism/socialism/whateverism. I am extremely concerned about many conservative Christian's religious views being conformed by their political views, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, fire at will
pony
That's even easier. What do we mean by markets? What do we mean by justice? Capitalism itself works (relatively) well (or to borrow winston Churchill's style, "less wickedly") when we have a fallen world rampant with sin nature. Whether you use market mechanism to fulfill your greed depends on your hearts rather than the nature of market economic systems. I can use my greed to act as a corporate raider in taking over a public company in a free market economy such as the US system (just like Carl Icahn had done to TWA in the 1980s), and similarly, I can also use my greed to finance decadent entertainment and smuggle gold and countless other goods in a fully communist or a hybrid socialist-semi-market economy such as the contemporary People's Republic of China. (Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, was well noted for her looting of political enemies' valuables such as vases, antiques, etc, which in turn was "confiscated" from "class enemies", and an unsubstantiated report indicates that Li Peng's family had got fat over the partial privatization of several electricity utilities in Northeastern China - it was said they had gobbled up RMB 6 billion - around US$700 million).
In fact, because free market leads to a more decentralized scene in the economy it means that over time greeds of individuals were offset by other economic party, kind of like how multivariable systems stays stable when you apply a disturbance to it - unlike state socialism where if the greed comes from the publicly-owned operative or government regulator everything is doomed since there is no constraints to their greed. That's the primary reason why I favour free market over socialism. Of course, free market is only a tool - it needs a Christian heart - a heart born again in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God - to run really well. Without it, things are not going to go well.