If You Insist

For now, most are willing to take a government check, said John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. That’s “better than losing the farm.”
Can Trump deliver a farmer bailout in time?

There's government spending, as the saying goes, and then there's our government spending. But that's not to say that everyone tends to like money being given to them, while begrudging it to others, for the same reasons. The American Left, with its bipartite view of the world, tends to be upset when money is given to "élites;" mainly because they so-called élite already have money. (For a lot of people, it's having money that makes one a member of the {as always, poorly-defined} élite in the first place.)

The American Right, on the other hand, tends to have moral reasons against giving money to "the undeserving other," one of two groups of bad people in its tripartite worldview. But that reasoning tends to be that people who work hard and apply themselves can be successful without needing to rely on either and handout, or a hand up, from anyone else. Unless, that is, they're the one's who are hurting... then there seem to be plenty of reasons why simply doing things correctly doesn't lead directly to success in life, and redistribution is justified. (As usual, the political class plays a part in this, as when Conservative politicians telling their rural constituencies that they're overtaxed to pay for urban layabouts.)

And I think that this is the thing that tends to bother Liberals about the Conservative attitude towards the Welfare State; that it smacks of "Welfare for me, but not for thee." Of course, it isn't that simple (most instances of perceived hypocrisy aren't), but without falling back on racial stereotypes, Conservatives tend to have a hard time explaining the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving outside of people they like versus those they dislike. And this feeds a general idea that Conservative talk of "small government" is really just a smokescreen, deployed in the service of what's really a plan to hoard scarce resources for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, self-image is wrapped up in a lot of this. A person's understanding of themselves colors the way they understand many other things in their lives. And many people's perceptions of themselves as good, and others as bad, tends to be much more durable than anything in the real world.