Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate, with more gates people won't be able to pass through, and an entire bureaucracy to administrate that — conveniently drawing even more resources from actually fulfilling the system's avowed purpose, ending with a system which keeps costing more and delivering less.

As long as you can provide a steady stream of anecdotes and scapegoats it'll go fine.

This can in turn justify cutting the system because it doesn't pull its weight[0], and the people who hate social support systems can pat themselves on the back over a job well done.

[0] not all at once of course, you by start cutting ancillary services like legal aid[1] in order to feed the ever-increasing gate-keeping machinery you keep adding to

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts...

> Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate

Not sure if that's a lie. In my experience, a big chunk of the general population is selfish enough that they'll abuse any system if they can get away with it. In a way, it's tragedy of the commons all over again - those people, confronted, will tell you, "I'm just a single man, just a drop in a bucket". They conveniently forget that there are 20 million other people in the country thinking the same thing.

In this automatic-benefits-allocating world, there would also be no more fraudulent claiming of money not entitled to! It should overall result in a net saving, I believe...

That's at least part of the theory behind basic income concepts: there's no fraud since everybody gets it, and you can get rid of the organisations in charge of validating & allocating.

Benefit fraud in the UK is estimated at around 1-2% of the total - a small enough amount that it shouldn't be the focus of policy instead of the 98-99% of genuine cases.