by Robert Higgs
Our predecessors dealt with their worries by relying on religious faith. For tangible assistance, they turned to kinfolk, neighbors, friends, coreligionists, and comrades in lodges, mutual-benefit societies, ethnic associations, labor unions, and a vast assortment of other voluntary groups. Those who fell between the cracks of the voluntary societies received assistance from cities and counties, but governmentally supplied assistance was kept meager and its recipients stigmatized.
In the 20th century, especially during the past seventy years, Americans have placed their faith in government — increasingly the federal government. Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, voluntary relief has taken a back seat to government assistance. Eventually, hardly any source of distress remained unattended by a government program. Old age, unemployment, illness, poverty, physical disability, loss of spousal support, childrearing need, workplace injury, consumer misfortune, foolish investment, borrowing blunder, traffic accident, environmental hazard, and loss from flood, fire, or hurricane all became subject to government succor.
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Our ancestors relied on themselves; we rely on the welfare state. But the “safety net” that governments have stretched beneath us seems more and more to be a spider’s web in which we are entangled and from which we must extricate ourselves if we are to preserve a prosperous and free society.
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The modern welfare state is often viewed as originating in Imperial Germany in the 1880s, when the Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, established compulsory accident, sickness, and old-age insurance for workers. Bismarck was no altruist. He intended his social programs to divert workingmen from revolutionary socialism and to purchase their loyalty to the Kaiser’s regime; to a large extent he seems to have achieved his objectives.
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We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both. 
(Read more from mises.org)