Welfare is what gives us better statistics on social deprivation, crime, health, and quite a few other things to the US despite you guys being the richer nation...
It's not a perfect system, but I prefer it to not having it. Friedman, Crockett, et al are all people who basically were comfortably off; people who do well in the US are of course happy with things. For people who do less well-paid jobs, have difficulties of once sort or another, suffer from discrimination, and so on... it's pretty clearly a worse system than the European ones. In the end it comes down to a value judgement of whether you'd rather share and avoid anyone being in a really bad state or whether you're happy to leave some people in a armadilloty state so some people can live lives of luxury. I don't think that the latter is morally defensible myself, so I have to go with the former. Besides, having a class of permanently unhappy/poor people in any society is a dangerous thing.
"If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all" - Will Durant
"All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it." - Ben Franklin
"If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Marx, Paine, Lenin, Jefferson were causes not results, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you foreve ito "I" and cuts you off forever from the "We"..." - John Steinbeck