>The wealthy benefit from all the things their taxes fund even more than the working class does.

Someone is not wealthy by coincidence. To gain wealth, you have to create a product or a service that people are willing to pay for i.e. people value the product/service more than the money that they have. Otherwise, they wouldn't be parting away from their money to get that product or service.

>The wealthy pay disproportionately little considering that their wealth is built upon the infrastructure that the working class pays for.

Not necessarily. Bill Gates didn't make a lot of money because government made computers for him. Mark Zukerberg did not make a lot of money because the government gave them the world wide internet network. Apple didn't make a lot of money because the government gave them something. If you look at the any money making businesses, they most likely made it despite of the government not because of it.

>I'm not sure what you mean, but you seem to be claiming that education is "useless"?

It's a huge waste of money for what it is.

>You go on to say that education does not help people get jobs. I mean, it's clear that education has a large role to play in employment rates.

Not necessarily. Most companies fall back to education for selection only when they don't find people with experience in the industry unless it is enforced by government regulations for people to get a degree, a degree is not very valuable.

>Besides that, the goal of education is not to ensure people are employed; it is to ensure that there is a well educated populace capable of making sane, rational decisions.

Such "goals" have been misused by totalitarian regimes to instill their brainwashing to the general populace so that the establishment can remain in power... and it is not untrue in the US given that most campuses are full of politics, sometimes even when it shouldn't be.

>I'm not going to try and tackle the last part of your statement here because I have no clue what you're trying to say.

Here is what I am trying to get at: when the government is in charge of healthcare for example, even the "socialist" countries like Norway and China have learnt that government is too incompetent to actually own and manage hospitals and insurance companies. So, they usually give this to one or more privately run companies. Which companies they pick for this is too much prone to corruption because when this happens, the company getting the contract generally gets a monopoly status and a huge number of customers by default. Even if the government doesn't pick a particular company, it can create regulations that can weed out small competitors eventually leading to a monopoly, and not necessarily the company that deserves to be one.

>We live in a society where the amount of effort you put in generally determines what you get out of life.

Exactly! So, if you tax someone heavily above a certain bracket, people making just below the bracket do not have a high enough incentive to put in any more effort, because they get to keep a small amount of what they make above that. So, people may be prone to stagnate. When they do, they are not contributing to the economy as much as they could otherwise have. On top of that, people willing to make more could move their businesses away to other countries when possible, doing further harm to the economy.

>No one can explain how socialist policies/programs would ruin the U.S.

Socialist programs harm everyone. Let me try to explain in the simplest possible way. When a politician promises to give things for "free", the government has to buy it from someone. But the government doesn't have any money of its own. It makes all the money by collecting taxes from the very people it says it's giving for free. So, whatever free thing it says it is giving away, it will have to stop spending money somewhere else or raise taxes. So, people are still paying. However, not directly anymore but via a middle man... but not just any other middle man. Government policies and programs react very slowly and poorly to market demands. It is made up of insane number of bureaucratic layers which are very difficult to maintain. So, additional companies spawn up to help maintain these processes. Meanwhile, the related industries have to follow strict regulations imposed by the government for "quality of service". More useless businesses then pop up to try to get around these regulations and laws. So, without insane amount of capital, nobody can hope to enter the industry because you have to pay insane amount just to keep it running. As a result, many existing companies gain monopolies and lose any incentive to do any better.

So, as a result, people may end up paying more for the same service, except it has no competition and shows no incentives for improving it.

>We have the ability to build a post-scarcity society but most of those who control the means of production are too selfish to see past their own noses.

Exactly! This is because it is virtually impossible for anyone to enter certain industries because of insane number of regulatory hell as I mentioned earlier.

>[citation needed]
>Seriously though, I'm gonna need some numbers on that before I take it at face value. Even if this is true, I'm sure there are some factors that you are willfully ignoring.

All governments publish their budgets and expenditure for everyone to see. It's not very hard to look up if you are interested.

>Why do you jump from "believing in ideas" to "mindless activism"? Why can nobody ever see the middle ground. For most people it's walways black or white. Well, sometimes, the correct answer is gray.

Because anyone who knows anything about how the world operates can clearly see how mindless and simple his ideas are. There is nothing profound he has to say. "We need less corruption and more government programs" is the gist of everything he has to offer.