Well every one knows that becoming severely ill is a possibility for anyone, that's what insurance is for. Can't afford insurance? Give up unhealthy habits to lower your rates, get a better job, look after family so that they will support you if you need help.

Get made redundant due to unforeseen shifts in the job market? Educate yourself, get a better job, work harder. Innovate, invent, think, mow your neighbors lawns. Use your brain and don't embark on a dead end career.

I agree that some social safety nets are needed for a civilized society (No one that is ill should go without out treatment if they don't have any money etc) but at the same time there are limits and I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line. We need to encourage people to be smarter, not dumber.

"People who preach personal responsibility are oblivious to the realities of the world." I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated. They are used as a tool for control by populist politicians. People will have more children just for another R250/month from the government instead of creating value. Socialism is a huge threat to everyone everywhere. It keeps the populous dumb and gives governments way too much power. Please don't preach about the realities of the world from your $200K/year+ household pedestal. Socialism is obviously working out great for you.

I don't have much to add to tetomb. While certain safety nets can be successfully argued to make sense in a large, wealthy, productive, and strongly-led society, that doesn't imply all safety nets make sense in all societies. It also doesn't imply that even the desirable nets can be had feasibly at a good quality of service. For deductive reasons why they don't, see Carlyle, Mises, et al. (If you prefer inductive observation, you can also look at a wide variety of examples across history of failed and failing attempts.)

Lest you think I have no experience with the US situation and system, I've never lived in a 6-figure income/year household, I have a family member who was unemployed for over a year, who broke her arm only months after losing her job and medical insurance (all the years of medical insurance payments wasted, she having never been injured or seriously ill during that time--but that's a risk one takes when deciding (when one has a choice) to pay for insurance), finally getting a job that paid less than half of what she used to make--she's just trying to make it to retirement because all the money the government has forced her to "save" is effectively untouchable until then. I have a cousin who recently got knee cancer (but he'll be fine because it hasn't spread, his dad's an attorney, and a lot of cancers are curable), and I have another family member with a mental illness who without medical treatment could not function. He has paid the (often brutal) consequences of going off the medication enough times, fortunately he's been stable now for some years. (And mental illness is far worse than cancer, from the underfunded and incomplete medical understanding and treatments to government systems for aid to the social stigmas that make making friends, getting family support, getting a job, and a whole bunch of other things incredibly difficult.) I'm not oblivious to realities of the world. I see the causes deserving of aid as well as the crappiness of institutionalized aid systems.