text: Or is this that old Austrian canard where empirical evidence is not as important as whatever you imagine will happen because you think your imagination is logical ?
  Everyone of your concerns are shown to be false by empirical evidence in hundreds of experiments over the past century. Even the very first one, done some 200 years, ago proved to be a roaring success - even though it's results got fraudulently altered by Malthus (he wrote the report without ever bothering to read the data it was supposedly based on - he just wrote what he imagined happened, and despite your dislike for him, his view of people was remarkably similar to yours).
  
  You worry about people being willing to fund the undeserving. Yet all over the world - universal programs are more popular, more easy to defend and more politically resilient than means-tested programs - and cheaper too because you don't need a huge burocracy to do the means-testing. People like programs they benefit from themselves.