That doesn’t answer my question. Government “safety nets” are not inevitabilites except among societies that have abandoned morality, FWICS.
How was the US going to come out of the Great Depression without the safety net? It wasn’t as cushy as it is now; they used work programs because the WASPs that ran the country were mortified at the idea of paying people not to work. If they couldn’t come up with a solution when 25% of the workforce was unemployed, they knew they’d face the same leftist radical unrest that had been seen in Europe in the 20s and 30s.
Most Americans don’t know that May Day has its roots in a radical bombing in Chicago in the 1880s; decades later you had the anarchist problems (Sacco & Vanzetti, for example). We developed a safety net to avoid the fate of Europe: communism or fascism. We were still a “moral” country at the time.