Taxation is the gun in the room and social benifit is the illusion.

If the state resolved to reject all use of force to enforce its dictates how long would it last?  Who would agree to pay taxes if the outcome of denying their polite requests was zilch enforcement.  If you call for a socialist state with its redistribution of wealth but you fail to recognise the 'gun in the room' you are not being honest with yourself at the least.

I don't care what magical costumes and special powers statists wish to imagine for your state's authorities, if they come for peoples money and will use violent force to make that happen that is violent theft.

I agree with Socialists that there is a "wealthy elite" who "through manipulation of our politics and economies" are taking more than they rightly should derive.  That is the fact.

So the statist's solution is what: this system is not working so we need to do even more of it, exert more control, make more rules.

I say this system of state and government is and always will be manipulated to favour the very few.  That is what it is for.  The idea that government delivers wide ranging social benefit is an illusion to grant a form of justification for the illusionary edifice of the state to exist at all.

How long would the people support the concept of the state if the people could clearly see they derived absolutely no social benefit at all, just paid taxes.  That would clearly be slavery.

If a state taxed 1% and delivered nothing it may, via the use of force, just about survive.  But at 50% and never any apparent benefit at all, ever: revolution.

A tax of 30% and a degree of social benefit people swing along with it.  Add to that 14 years of government school indoctrination and a fundamentally uncritical media and they even can start to push-up the levels of taxation.

This balancing act is not how the state works, it is the illusion it creates of how it works whilst, in reality, the truly wealthy elite own and control politics and economies.

Without the state to do the bidding of this 'truly wealthy elite' they are cut-off from the control mechanism they depend upon, have invented, to maintain their advantage whilst the people fail to see the state for what it really is, a modern form of slavery, and instead think it is all about delivering social benefit and justice.