Consider these two organizations. Which one sounds more compassionate? Organization X offers people food in exchange for money. When people refuse to exchange money for Organization X's food, Organization X uses their own money to market their products and reinvest in facilities which entice customers to shop there. If customers refuse to buy food from Organization X, Organization X will go out of business. Organization Q produces food. Organization Q claims that since food is necessary for life and a healthy populace, people should be forced to chip in for Organization Q's costs. Those who do not pay will be put in jail by employees of Organization Q, and if you resist Organization Q's employees, the employees have the right to shoot you in defense of their own lives. Which organization sounds more compassionate? Which organization would you prefer to interact with? Governments provide many things, such as security, schools, intelligence gathering, and poverty assistance programs, but none of these are defining characteristics of governments. They can be provided by many non-government actors in society, and historically, they have been. What makes government a unique institution in society is its widely recognized right to achieve its ends via threats of violence against non-aggressors. This is why you would go to jail for trying to "tax" someone's income, or if you attempted to "regulate" the commercial interactions of strangers, or "declared war" on one of your foes. Hence, governmental organizations are more like Organization Q, and organizations in the free market are more like Organization X. I became a Progressive when I thought that Progressivism meant being compassionate. I stopped being a Progressive when I realized that putting massive obligations on strangers through government coercion was not compassion.