You also see it in the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers that drop bombs on civilians in other countries, the global surveillance system, military aid to despotic regimes with no regard to human rights, the border guards that imprison children and harass travelers.

You also see it in crumbling roads, ancient subway systems, shitty public schools, dumb regulations that make the market less competitive, "affordable" housing initiatives that make housing less affordable, pointless subsidies for farmers, and unsustainable pension funds.

This is true. It requires much more from the general populous than just the cash. Few private citizen wants to invest the time to fix the allocation. It’s a classic free rider problem.

A healthy democracy does require an engaged, educated voting populace to avoid being captured. I think the USA has been largely captured by the merchant kings who focus the populous not on their ability to change the nations trajectory, but instead on meaningless distractions.

Did you hear about the anti-gun nuns who bought a significant piece of ownership in the gun manufacturers? They have voting rights in those companies, and the manufacturers are slowly being forced to answer to them.

There's a very simple solution to making the government less susceptible to regulatory capture - make it as small as possible.

Isn’t that just trading a democracy for an oligarchy?

You mostly see how much of it is squandered away by incompetent and/or corrupt bureaucrats.

I'd love to pay more taxes if the actual so-called "social contract" wasn't something in between a heist and an absolute management mess.

That's a bit of a simplistic argument about ingratitude though. Let's say he takes his $150,000 that is deducted each year in taxes and then fractions it down by state and federal taxes (federal taxes almost certainly being the majority of it) then fractions that down by what percentage of his taxed income represents federal or state programs for all the things you listed instead of other huge parts of government spending bloat such as military industrial outlays, assorted federal or state pork and so forth. The relative percentage of his $150,000 that actually goes to the things that ensure clean air, good road, parks, safe milk and etc would be much smaller. This is also taking aside just what percentage of any of the useful things any given tax payer actually benefits from personally (maybe he doesn't visit parks at all, or own a car for travelling along the interstate highways). That's where we could argue about someone being ungrateful while benefiting from public funds.

Where things get tricky and shitty (because they heavily lay the criticism on private individuals wanting to keep more of the money they worked for instead of on government not spending so fucking much without pause or careful control) is when you think it's by default somehow whiny to complain that a majority of one's income tax payments that go to a government which inevitably spends the majority of that money on things like the military budget or bureaucratic bloat. Does so much money deserve to go to these things without at least considering the complaints or reasonable debate of tax payers? The Etc etc etc you mention conceals a huge amount of government spending that is validly debatable and shouldn't just automatically be taken as a given because "progress".

I mean, for example, is it unreasonable to ask why an $800+ billion dollar defense budget is necessary for a country neighbored by Canada and Mexico? Is there a real risk that Russia and China will suddenly invade if the U.S doesn't tax its higher income citizens more heavily to pay for that much spending on this huge part of the federal budget? Then of course there's the question of just how much more expensive ensuring even the more "reasonable" basics of public spending that you mentioned is than it could be if there weren't all sorts of known inefficiencies in government services. For example: Federal and state healthcare spending in the U.S is a major part of both state and federal budgets, but how much of it simply gets wasted on terribly administered public health policies?

In basic terms, debates on taxable income also encourage debates on better public spending, and that's not something anyone should dismiss as "privileged whining" if they really think government also needs to be monitored and restricted in how it does things with public money.

And in your delivery rooms, where in half of the states, more than half of all children are born to parents who are on Medicaid.