Should we have concern about the welfare of strangers? Why?

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Because Christ said, "When you had done these things for the least, you have done them for me."
For those who insist on calling us a Christian country, who more often than not are conservatives and libertarians, they have to be willing to live by Christ's call to care for the stranger, and for the least among us. And that means Ayn Rand, with all her sociopathic talk about the virtue of selfishness, has to be tossed into the dustbin of history.

I help others because 1) it feels good, and 2) I prefer to live in a society where people care about each other; therefore, I am the change I wish to see in the world. As to WHY I prefer this planet be a nice, helpful place, it's because I feel a "nice" world is more beneficial to me than a not-nice world.

Before someone points out that I'm technically being "selfish" too, I'm being "selfish" in a way that I, as a human and a social animal, am programmed to be. There's a solid evolutionary reason why doing good for others feels good. Monkeys and apes understand this. Whales, dolphins, and crows understand this, so why some humans still struggle with the concept is beyond me.

Additionally, "helping strangers" is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are different degrees and varieties of "help" one can render. Personally, I favor social safety nets; however, I'm smart enough to know that dumping heaps of government money onto a problem isn't always the best solution.

I don't care if "altruism serves the ego." In this case, both of us wins if the altruistic intervention benefited the recipient. the recipient of the altruism, and the altruistic person both win. A "win-win."

The reason behind most of altruism is not merely to "serve the ego." Though there's an element of this "selfishness" in most acts of altruism.

What matters, really, is what results from the altruism.

Well, this is an interesting question. I think it depends on how you view life. When I took a biological anthropology class, as a bio class was necessary for my degree, I developed some understanding. Some monkeys (from whom we evolved) have characteristics that evolved in them that are contradictory. Both further the species in different ways. The first characteristic is the one similar to Ayn Rand's hypocritical philosophy (she died broke and on public assistance) that you should basically look out for yourself. Some monkeys would abandon their children for example, or take food from the others in order to ensure their own individual survival. The same species of monkey is also known to share food with the other monkeys in their groups in spite of scarcity, or take in an infant abandoned by its mother. This behavior is also helping ensure the species survival as a whole, and both have shown to be evolved characteristics. I am sorry that I'm not going to cite this as I'm going off the cuff here. If some sort of a debate ensues, I'll try to add more. But moving along...these contradictory traits in the monkeys are also obviously present in humans. We see people acting in selfish ways in order to benefit themselves, and we see them acting in altruistic ways in order to benefit humanity as a whole. Often, these contrasting characteristics can be present in one person, who acts according to circumstances of myriad origins. What I have determined is that the way we choose one characteristic (selfishness) versus the other (altruism) will shape the course of our own evolution. If the balance is tipped in favor of altruism, we may eventually have a Utopian society. If we instead act in our own interest, we may eventually destroy ourselves and our environment and we'll die out. Or we will evolve (even more) into a genocidal warmongering people. I guess you have to consider for yourself what makes you happy, as long as you aren't encroaching on anyone else's freedom.

Allen Greenspan also supported Rand financially until she died. Thanks in part to her, no one can make it on public assistance alone.