"The truth is that not even a big and centralized government can successfully perform these functions. - Lynn Chu

[Protecting everyone against the hazards of old age, illness, and unemployment...floods and all other vicissitudes of fortune.]
This fact has been demonstrated over and over again—in the most extreme form, in the communist countries of Russia and China, where Marxist doctrine holds that citizens proceed on the principle 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'

• In those societies the principle never worked. 

Instead, government officials became 'the new class' of privileged autocrats, enslaving the masses. 

In our own country, one social welfare program after another has turned out to have effects opposite to those that were intended by the well-meaning people who supported them.

• Good intentions alone are not enough. 

Governmental employees, no less than employees of private businesses, will put their own interests above the interest of others.
Calling them public servants does not alter that fact."

--Milton and Rose Friedman, Tyranny of the Status Quo (HBJ, 1983-4), pp. 38-9.