What is it about transportation wherein socializing the costs of using it would make it work?
Toll roads work all around the world, and better than the routes where the costs are socialized.
>Yet this same education system is what has produced a society capable of enormous economic output over the relatively short history of public education.
The modern education system arose largely in the 1930' "high school movement", which was almost all locally funded and controlled, and thus subject to very little socializing of costs.
As the costs of providing education have become increasingly socialized, the spending efficiency has decreased as rent-seeking institutions like teachers unions have taken over:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
>Your argument is the most basic of libertarian nonsense that would argue that in past decades would argue that tax dollars collected in UT shouldn't fund interstate highways in CA.
I never made a libertarian argument. I made an appeal to basic economics. That triggered your anti-libertarian ideological defense mechanism, which has been instilled in the populace by the rent-seeking institutions that rely on centralized control:
https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
These rent-seeking mechanisms are rapidly taking over the economy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
And as they do, the belief systems that they rely on, like anti-libertarianism, become more pervasive.