This is more like the wheel rather than syphilis. Something created by humans to serve a purpose, that endures because it continues to be useful.
> One of the major advancements in civilization was the idea that parents _cannot_ pass their debts down to their children.
With welfare, it's not parents' debts being passed on to their children. Its the childrens' obligation to begin with.
I see it more like a implementation of a way to allocate resources throughout a society, that increasingly becomes suboptimal over time as the incentives to participate in such an arrangement (not to be read/interpreted as agreement) will become less distributed among individuals.
One would think that with the technology we have at our disposal, societies wouldn't have to rely on co-opting parties that didn't ask to be born where they are told, "it's your obligation", when distributing resources for sustenance and quality of life.
If we can provide food, shelter, and energy to the elderly in an automated fashion, how can there be no retirement?
Since that aspect of human nature seems to me impossible to change, my attitude is to try to live with both benefits and obligations I have "inherited".
But that is by choice of those who choose to give birth to those people, not those who are born. You bequeath those benefits onto the recipient (both as a society and as parents) by creating/sustaining the environment into which they're born.
> Since that aspect of human nature seems to me impossible to change, my attitude is to try to live with both benefits and obligations I have "inherited".
I as well, even though I might have disagreements with it. I don't have any qualms about the amount I contribute into social security yearly (My income surpasses the max contribution limit), nor that I have to support both of my parents because of their poor life and financial choices.
The only recourse I have is to ensure that any children I have are as burden-free as possible. I'm not just giving them the gift of life, but the gift of freedom, which is equally priceless.
I'm speaking about the world we currently live in though.
Inter-generational debt can and does destroy both societies and governmental systems. I'd argue that over the next 40 years, it's probably the biggest problem the western democracies are facing.
I didn't want to dive too much into the political side of this, but I found your comment to be a little too flip given the nature of the topic. One of the major advancements in civilization was the idea that parents _cannot_ pass their debts down to their children. That worked great for many decades, but we seem to have found away around that by collectivizing it. Not good.