A couple of actual quotes from the Founding Fathers. Every now and then you get some moron, that wants to tell folks that the founding fathers would have supported welfare. Give them this, and then smack their jaws so hard that slobber gets knocked out of their mouth.

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816






“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

— James Madison, in a letter to James Robertson