America subsidizes its rich tremendously. I have absolutely no problem with the genuinely self-made rich. I have a big problem with billionaire welfare queens.

Direct subsidies:

- In 2008-2009, America bailed out its financial class to the tune of almost a trillion dollars. Some of this was paid back, but it still amounted to a zero-interest loan to people worth $1M+. A lot of it ended up in offshore accounts and bonuses.

- The Federal Reserve system is a crony network that provides zero (or negative!) interest loans to connected banks with which they can gamble in the markets. Their losses can be socialized through mechanisms like bailouts and the FDIC, while gains are privatized. Since this is newly created money, it amounts to a tax on the savings of the rest of the economy. Wouldn't you love to be lent money at 0% interest to gamble in a can't-lose casino?!?

- America's contracting process is hugely corrupt, and there's a huge number of pigs at the trough. Nothing irritates me more than rich people who got rich off government contracts whining about all those "parasites on welfare." (Ironically, the defense contractor crowd funds a lot of right-wing stuff like that.)

- The U.S. military is used partly to protect the politically risky offshore investments of America's moneyed classes. Shell Oil is not charged a fee for service when the U.S. foreign policy apparatus leans on a foreign government or deploys military force to guard its interests. The middle class pays (and sometimes dies) for that.

- The public funds scientific research, while private players get rich off marketing its applications. In some cases technologies are developed whole-cloth in public academic and military institutions and are then more or less handed over to private interests. Tycoons have been getting rich off publicly funded research for a century. Did AT&T have to pay for the development of TCP/IP? Nope, we did. In some cases, private entities even end up as the owners of publicly developed intellectual property. That means they can sue you for using what you paid to invent.

- As an extension of the above, military and scientific SBIR grants are used by many private companies to fund their R&D, which they then keep proprietary and market.

Regressive taxes:

- The tax code is filled with loopholes that require complex accounting to achieve, amounting to a huge regressive tax on those who do not have personal accountants.

- Complex regulations amount to a regressive tax on new entrants to an industry and on smaller players, since larger players can afford to employ armies of paper pushers to comply with the law.

There's more than that I'm sure.

Americans forget all this. They pay out the nose in taxes and government debt to subsidize the rich, and then the rich convince them that they're rugged self-made individualists. Sorry, but to be a rugged self-made individualist tycoon you must: pay for everything you need to set up your venture, pay for every service you use, pay for the development of the IP that you use, and pay everyone you employ. If any of that was subsidized, you fail at claiming to be a self-righteous "Atlas" and need to STFU.

As an engineer, a personal peeve of mine is technology businessmen who beat up on academia... as if they'd have anything to market without academic research. You will find a couple of those on HN from time to time arguing that academia is unnecessary, over-funded, etc. while they sit around plotting the next startup idea based on academic research from the 60s and 70s.