> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges.

Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising anywhere in society, any more than paying for a Netflix subscription makes Netflix responsible for or capable of handling those problems.

This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.

> But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse all my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to invest in my future.

Agreed. We should drastically lower taxes, and ensure that most of the resources necessary to improve society are left in the hands of society itself, and not monopolized by a single institution that's subject to perverse incentives.

But if we assume that we're stuck paying the same level of taxes for the time being, and treat those taxes merely as losses, the question reduces to whether we want a monopolistic organization run by people with ulterior motives exercising a controlling influence over our lives and livelihoods -- and often failing to solve those complex problems in the first place -- or whether we would still prefer to solve those problems for ourselves with the resources we have left. And to my mind, the latter is still preferable, even if unhelpful strangers are stealing a good chunk of my resources.

> But right now we have the worst of both worlds: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.

Yes, that's all true. But to my point above, the only way out of this is not to expect that the incompetent grifters will somehow start behaving like competent philanthropists, but rather to contain them and minimize the grift -- either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems.