> The US managed to fund a military, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and other good stuff before that year, right?

Mostly, no, the United States did not. The states did some (less than they alone, ignoring the feds, do now), the US did a little (far less than now, and funded by extensive use of simultaneously regressive and contractionary tariffs and excise taxes) at normal times and when it scaled up imposed special taxes for the purpose (including, starting in the Civil War, income taxes.) For the military part specifically, prior to WWI (and, to—IIRC—a lesser extent between WWI and WWII), the US had (especially aside from the Navy) very little standing military, relying on expanding out from a small cadre via conscription and rushed training in crises.

Back then we had a LOT more tariffs. Free trade is a new thing. Tariffs are taxes too, just way more regressive since they raise the prices of almost everything.

Indeed, yet it holds these concepts hostage whenever someone suggests we eliminate entire classes of taxes.

The truth is the tax system has two primary objectives:

1) to prevent upper middle class from the type of long term wealth accumulation that allows the plebs to enter (and challenge) the elite

2) To fund a hyper scale bureaucracy that constantly seeks the lower bound on the efficiency curve

To be clear, a large component of the "hyper scale bureaucracy" is nominally privatized within the military industrial complex.

> to prevent upper middle class from the type of long term wealth accumulation that allows the plebs to enter (and challenge) the elite

The capitalist middle class (the petit bourgeoisie, the thing thar Americans tend to call the upper middle class because Americans refer to a very large segment of the working classc , including the whole of the proletarian intelligentsia, as “middle class”) aren't plebs, they are, more like the equites.