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Notes -
Big thing - most people didn't live long enough to get old, and the ones who did were supported by their children, or they weren't. We (across Western civilisation - this is profoundly not US-specific) have socialised the cost of elder care (including healthcare), and didn't realise at the time we did it how big the bill could get when everyone would survive to old age.
Medium thing - as spiritual coercion (the implied threat of donate to church-funded public services or go to hell) stopped working, we had to use a lot more temporal coercion to fund the sort of thing that used to be funded by churches and is now funded by the State. Also, the main relevant service is education, and at some point we made the (mostly correct) decision that education through high school should be universal, which dramatically raises the cost and makes charging parents impractical (because a substantial minority can't pay).
Medium thing - post sexual revolution, we normalised single motherhood. That requires a system of transfer payments to single mothers. (Child support is insufficient, because the percentage of a man's potential earning power that the child support infrastructure can extract is MUCH lower than the percentage that a wife and kids can extract in an intact marriage by relying on natural affection).
Small thing - more complex societies need more infrastructure, which costs money, and is often easier to fund through the state than privately, although libertarians have found rare historical examples of things like roads being funded privately.
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