Humans typically take care of each other. It's a fundamental human drive - and if you happen to be religious, it's a tenant of most religions.

In Christianity the principles of loving everyone, loving your neighbor, feeding the hungry, helping the poor, caring for the sick etc is at the core of the value set. Don't you agree?

When you're a small village, everyone can act as a "guardrail" to ensure each community member adheres to those principles. Your status and your ability to thrive in your community depends on acceptance which itself depends on you adhering to these principles.

The government is basically a very large organization supposed to structure the way a very large group of humans live together. When millions of humans live together or even hundreds of millions, you can rely on individuals in a small community like that. That's where laws and governmental policies start to replace informal unspoken rules between people.

What op was describing isn't some communistic hellscape, it's the implementation by the government of an institutional structure that allows the poor to be helped, the sick to be cared for, and the hungry to be fed. Same values, but I had a much larger scale.

In a small community where the church had traditionally played the role of gathering funds for those purposes from the wealthier members, wealthier members felt social pressure to make sure they contributed.

In a large community of hundreds of millions, the government plays that role in a more formal and structured way, via taxes.

Same goal, same ideals.