"They don't want to hurt the country"

Only because to them, making half the people in the country dependant upon welfare isn't hurting. As Prager said, it's a blessing when more and more people are dependant. It's a choice, and all choices are equal. That precludes that some choices may damage the chooser, or his family, or his social circle, or his society, or his country. All choices are up to the individual and no chioce can be judged by its consequences or by its motivations, never mind by lack of information or by depth of thought.

This is why our education establishment is so opposed to dispensing information or training depth of thought in the classroom. They look to some magical response to come out of "social maturity" (in vogue twenty years ago) or "Social IQ" (which captured the imaginations of teachers ten years ago).

The motivations of liberals are complex, but when you dissect the underlying assumptions and the mid-level therefores and the top-level results, you'll find that all the layers involve being good, wishing good, presuming the ideas to be good, and then executing good.

You start with the trend toward spreading the wealth. You begin with Jesus' advice to the rich young ruler, "Give away all your money." Never mind the context of this advice. Never mind that Jesus never once said that everyone must give away all their money. Jesus was poor, his disciples were poor (except that poor people don't have a guy who handles the money, do they), the leftist thinks right-wingers should be poor by giving away all their money to poor people. The poor people deserve the money because the evil capitalist system exploited them, not because of any choice of their own. Capitalism has been labeled evil for so long it's impossible to show its good points to any leftist in any discussion in any situation. They know they want poor people to have money, they ignore what's inside themselves (the urge to keep their own money--I don't know a single left winger who has given away more than a tiny fraction of their own money to support the poor) and that movement to force other people to give away their own money makes them good. They are nearly saints in their own eyes, very Jesus-like in demanding that conservatives give away their own money and make themselves poor.