Welfare vs Charity

This issue bothers me more than anything nowadays, so let's have debate.

So why should a person be FORCED to help someone else? If someone needs help, they can always ask for charity.

Because once we choose to create a society, we agree to sacrifice some of our personal resources in the interests of greater availability of communal resources.  The next step is to decide which communal resources require the greatest investment.  Poverty is ubiquitous, and a drain on resources.  Whatever the reason, whether the poor have been unlucky, poorly educated, or are just stupid, lazy, or evil, they must be dealt with, and it has been proven over and over that personal and privately organized charity is inefficient and insufficient to the task.  Personally I believe that this is, in part, because people with lots of money have lots of money because they are not the most charitable people.  Politically I know that the bottom line on creating a minimum standard of living for the poor would be cheaper than addressing the problem in the half-assed, judgmental way we do now.
Just a few lines on an interesting topic.  Let's see if anyone else can post a position or an argument.  I'm not really interested in responding to people who are only capable of sniping at mine, or yapping about how it's all the fault of the "niggers" and the Jews.