Should begging be legal?

In developed capitalist countries, many homeless people are mentally ill, and deliberately avoid social aid and government help. Obviously some of them are people who had a tough break and ended up on the streets, but many are just people who have dropped out of society. Among them are also young people who've run away from home, who usually do it temporarily. I've had some bad experiences with these.* In the third world, the situation is of course different, though again complex and multifaceted. Hence I can't vote in this poll, as there are too many variances. As for what would happen in socialism: I suppose I would put that begging should be illegal and punishable as minor hooliganism or, with multiple offences, treated as a psychological problem to be resolved by the appropriate professionals. Again though, even in socialism there are variations. Yugoslavia for instance had problems with unemployment due to its market socialism, whereas countries in the Soviet bloc always had full employment and labour shortages. How can a single measure be applied across variations of socialism?


*Once, I had a job delivering boxes of paper to offices, and there were several offices downtown which had no elevators. So we had to carry several dozen boxes up several flights of stairs, and all the while there was a young, well-dressed guy begging on the stoop at the entrance of the building. Needless to say he is only an individual, but individual experiences like this do add up.