A successful academic faces lifelong debt

> My point is that you have no idea what it's like for those who are poor in the US. To claim that they have abundant opportunity is ludicrous. I know this society inside and out, I've got friends at all social levels-- from dirt-poor to three-digit millionaires-- and I know that you're impossibly naive.

I think you are being deliberately deceptive. I have friends that went to work in the USA. One worked for a harvesting company and received a good salary. Another did long distance trucking. All of these are “low paying” jobs, yet in the USA they receive excellent salaries.

Many people in low paying jobs (such as plumbers) can own their own home – which is unheard of in many countries. The salary for manual labour is incredibly high.

> More desirable is a world in which people have the ability to maximize their contributions to society, because they're given the resources necessary to realize their potential.

You view someone earning money as a “gift from society”. If someone works or has a business, he owns his own money with no obligation to any other party. A lot of people on the left wants to view individuals as servants of society (as you do).

> Everyone pays taxes. Rich people pay more. I have no problem with this.

You do not have a problem with this, because you do not fall in the top tax bracket. That is the “not me” phenomenon in action.

> They get more out of society;

Again, you view any money an individual makes as a gift from society. This is not so. For a voluntary transaction (where there is no coercion) no one owes a third party anything.

> The only one of those that's been demonstrated to be a bad idea is the cash payment for having children (which encourages people to have kids they can't support).

Free universities tend to be of much worse quality. Two good examples are Germany and Greece. The qualities of Universities in these countries are much lower than countries such as the United States. Greece has the highest number of foreign students studying abroad for its population size.

The Basic Income Grant causes a lot of people to work and places an incredibly high burden on tax payers. In my country they want to introduce the basic income grant. Currently there are 13 million people on welfare (child grants which stretches until a child is 16, unemployment,) while there are only 3 million tax payers (i.e. four people getting grants for every one person on tax). BIG will push it to ten people receiving grants for every one person paying tax.

> That's not poverty. Not even close.

In the USA even an unskilled person can get a fairly good job (as the above example shows). How exactly do you then have severe poverty (like the thing you talk about) when even unskilled people get work?

In my country you are dirt poor even if you work 8 hours a day. What you label poverty is not poverty at all. They show photos of poor Americans – eating a McDonalds hamburger.

I ate my first hamburger at a shop when it was my birthday. Poor people usually eat staple foodstuffs (not McDonalds).

> What happens if people stop doing their jobs? Shops close down, infrastructure fails, and no one can get any work done.

Shops stay open because the shop owner sells his goods for a profit. An open shop is not a gift from society; it is a shop-owner acting in self-interest by selling things for a profit. The same goes for people working in infrastructure (e.g. those employed by municipal roads agencies, etc…). As soon as people stop doing their jobs (as unionists often like to do) they stop getting paid.

Except in the basic income grant world that many of the left like to live.

> That's because the US put a lot of money into universities/research in the 1940s-60s, which attracted a lot of talent.

Not really. One reason is that the USA has high tuition fees that enable good universities. If people pay the tuition fees themselves they are more inclined to actually work (instead of the 4 years of party in many countries). You also have private universities (which are not government funded) which are very good.