Why Do Liberals Love Supporting Freeloaders?

Liberals just want to hand out money. Reward bad behavior. Undermine work. End of story. That’s the charge. It gets tossed out like it explains everything.

Except that’s not actually what’s happening.

What liberals support is a social safety net because letting problems fully detonate is the most expensive option on the menu.

A safety net isn’t a gift.

It’s damage control.

Missed paychecks turn into evictions.

Untreated stress turns into addiction.

Small setbacks turn into permanent ones.

And once someone falls far enough, everyone pays more—through policing, courts, emergency services, and long-term dependency. And when a society creates a large enough disenfranchised underclass, it doesn’t just hurt them. It drags everyone down. Or worse, it turns into civil unrest and suddenly nobody lives without bars on their windows.

This isn’t compassion versus responsibility.

It’s early intervention versus cleanup.

We don’t let a roof cave in to teach a lesson about maintenance.

We fix the leak because structural collapse is a terrible teacher.

Now—before the objections queue up—yes. Of course there are people who try to rip off the system.

There always are.

Every large system has fraud. Defense contracts have fraud. Medicare has fraud. Wall Street has fraud. Corporate tax avoidance alone costs more than every welfare scam combined, but somehow that never becomes a character indictment of all executives.

We don’t respond to fraud by burning down the system.

We respond by prosecuting fraud.

Because designing policy around the worst anecdotes guarantees the worst outcomes.

Now let’s talk about the group most often labeled “freeloaders.”

Undocumented workers.

Here’s where the conversation usually gets loud and sloppy:

“Why should we let them benefit from government services our tax dollars pay for?”

But we already do.

Just not efficiently.

Not rationally.

Not cheaply.

We bar them from basic, preventative healthcare.

Then act shocked when they end up in emergency rooms—the most expensive square footage in American medicine—with conditions that should’ve been treated earlier for a fraction of the cost.

ERs don’t check immigration status. They treat people.

And those bills don’t disappear. They get passed along to hospitals, insured patients, and taxpayers.

Even under the worst possible system—the dumbest, most expensive way to handle healthcare—undocumented workers are still a net positive to the economy. They work. They pay sales taxes. They pay property taxes through rent. They pay payroll taxes and subsidize Social Security they’ll never collect.

Which brings us to the part no one likes to say out loud:

If we handled this better—basic care, earlier treatment, fewer emergencies—undocumented workers would be an even bigger net positive. Because it would cost us less to have them here than it currently does.

Same people.

Same work.

Lower cost.

Liberals don’t support safety nets because they love freeloaders—any more than we put guardrails on highways because we want to encourage bad driving.

That’s not ideology.

That’s basic cost control for a society that intends to survive.