On promoting "the general welfare" of the American people

In the Preamble to the American Constitution, its Framers state the purpose of the document. One of the reasons it was being created was to "promote the general welfare" of We the People. As indicated by James Madison's comment below, this phrase referred to the protection of all Americans' individual liberties by limiting the power of the federal government to infringe upon them, not a redistribution of what one has earned.

"With respect to the words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them (enumerated in the Constitution). To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

-James Madison, "father" of the Constitution