When every benefit is received as a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone gratitude.

...

In the welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement.

...

...a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism.

via Theodore Dalrymple:
What is Poverty?
.