It's a by-product of our "bleeding heart liberal" society where people are overly-sympathetic to the underprivileged,exploited or from a minority culture.It's a view that relates to the "treat others as they would treat you" belief and there's always going to be individuals aware of this and prepared to exploit it and cash in on it.
Because we have been trained to rely on the gov't to come to the rescue and they have so we don't think we'll ever see the day when the gov't stops caring about it's people - but it will.