People can add value to the system through their actions. This goes back to one of the reasons for the private property, market-based economic systems - the idea of improvements, of non-zero-sum benefits. The cliche of making the pie bigger instead of just fighting over the size of our individual slices.

Many paths more commonly taken by the less fortunate are themselves net negative to society as a whole. Like crime or drug addiction/disease that socialized programs end up paying for.

So if we could be effective in redirecting people from those paths to healthily contributing ones instead, we could get to positive-sum. I'm already paying a lot of money for "today's result" things like property insurance, incarceration, and first responders for people, in the long run is taking action to fight the root problem more expensive?

(One of today's problem is that we mostly try to intervene at adolescence or later, at which point a ton of damage has already been done.