^^^^^ CB: I'm sure that was part of it, but not all of it. The idea that potential opponents were so dumb that they could just be "anesthetized" is a bit naive on your part.
WH -- This was not just my naivete, but also that of smug people like Gouverneur Morris, a very condescending and patronizing character who believed in many ways that the opponents of the constitution were dumb and able to be fooled.
Also, there is this putting money where their mouth was: "1798 law imposed a 20 cents per month withholding tax on a seaman's wages. This revenue was to be turned over to the Treasury Department and used to support sick and injured seamen. Kopel notes that the 1798 law is a good precedent for programs such as Medicare." The Christian charitable sense in that founding generation was not all sham and hypocrisy as you imply. Welfare is basically an insurance system. Organizations like the Masons had welfare societies. There were lots of Masons among the founding fathers. Why not stick a Masonic institution in the Constitution ? As you imply with respect to getting people to go into debt to consume, they had enough sense of the bourgeois economic system to know that it runs on a mass of consumers of commodities. And so they are probably smart enough to anticipate Keynes' understanding that Welfare creates or saves consumers. The bourgeois have to put money in the hands of the working class masses for circulation to make up for exploiting it from them in production. It's a fundamental contradiction of capitalism at all levels of development.
WH: While I agree with your reading, it doesn't sound much to me like an exercise of Christian charity.