Exclusive ownership of property is necessary and good because it prevents tragedies of the commons. The state could step in and take ownership of private goods, but that would be communism. The state also can set price floors and ceilings, but those actions have deleterious effects on supply and demand. Regarding the actual amount of wages, I think that focusing on just the minimum wage is a bad approach, because many workers' wages are subsidized by medicaid, food stamps, etc. Additionally, lower wages are good for high school students and other who are trying to obtain their first unskilled job. I'm also not sure what the jubilee has to do with this, because that dealt with the discharge of debt, which we allow for through bankruptcy (please don't drag student debt into this).
Yeah, that was odd, and missed the point. The current welfare system incentivizes people to stay on welfare. This is an empirical thing. People's real wages drop whenever they earn over $X of dollars per month because they lose the aforementioned social welfare programs. This problem was a whole lot worse prior to the creation of the EIC. This program was originally designed to smooth out these bumps. The problem, is that over time, people have changed its focus to wealth redistribution, decoupling the it from the benefits it was supposed to smooth. Making the EIC uniform across the country also worsens the problem because there should be some sort of a COLA. The point of this, is that current benefits encourage rational people to stay poor.
Single parent households are a luxury. There is a definite correlation between the health of a job market and the number of single provider households. Instead of forcing the system to pay higher wages, which would probably increase inflation (a regressive indirect tax), the government should create a system that increases the demand for labor. It should also remove the number of debt incentives in the tax code. Presently, companies usually receive a better deal if they issue debt than if they issued stock. The best way to solve the Marxist problem of income disparity is to encourage companies to issue stock instead of obtaining debt. That way more ordinary people will have the ability to own "the means of production". Obama certainly isn't helping this by the way. His new fiduciary rule, auto-IRA's, and Government MEPs are going to destroy 95% of all American's ability to seek private financial advice.
Government social spending and private charitable spending, empirically, are substitutes. Beyond that, things get a little hazy on how much government charity crowds out private charity, but some does occur. This private charity also, as mentioned in #1, creates an artificially low wage, and forces people to effectively work for government services instead of cash.
I think increasing welfare does increase the power of government by giving the government the ability to direct investment and thus shape financial activity. If social security was run through private accounts, then the shape of America would look very different than it does today because people would invest in the provision of goods and services instead of having their accounts raided to do things like fund drone strikes.