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.

I HAVE NOT read through all of the posts above, though I did read most of the earlier ones and kind of skimmed through the rest of them.  However, when my mother and father divorced, my mother took my sister and I and we moved from low income apartment to low income apartment.  My mother couldn't get a job because she had to take care of us, and she couldn't send us to a daycare because she had to have had a job first to do that.  We lived off of Welfare checks and food stamps for about 5 years.  We even ended up living in a homeless shelter for about 6 months.  Anyway, once my sister and I entered school my mother was able to work a job while we were there.  Fast forward 12 years and now my mother has re-married and we're a typical middle class family.  I'm going to college and not receiving much financial assistance from the government or my family, resulting in me having loans up my ass when I graduate in a couple years.  Needless to say, we were once dependent on the state, and now we aren't anymore.  While I know some people do abuse the system, the ones who don't shouldn't be punished.  If it wasn't for the help of the government during those times I don't think we ever would have turned out to be the socially productive people we are today.  Perhaps this means they need to have better knowledge of who is receiving welfare, and keep an eye on them to ensure they spend it intelligently, and impose some form of ramification if they aren't.