I believe in free will, but I also see people getting manipulated all the time. The question isn’t “is someone trying to manipulate me?”, the question is “who is trying to manipulate me, and what do they want?” Usually they want money and power, that’s normal. What if they want to sterilize you?
The point is simple: Marx is a compelling theorist and has legitimate critiques of capitalism, and there are large groups of educated, intelligent, good people who feel like Marx has their back in areas capitalism turns its back on. If you write him off, you are oversimplifying and underestimating Marxism.
You don’t have to be a general sending men into battle to actively weigh the value of human lives versus other objectives and goals. We could give every person who gets on every airplane a parachute, but it’s not worth the cost. We could ban pools, or double-down—why don’t we ban swimming entirely? It’s not worth the cost, that’s why.
In the normal scheme of things, we don’t really question where money comes from or how the system works. We only pay attention if it stops working, or, perhaps, when we see our government follow up the biggest spending bill in history by casually mentioning it may add a few hundred billion a few weeks later. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2008 under President Obama was initially billed at under $800,000,000,000 (800B), as a reminder, and here we find ourselves talking about The CARES Act as “2 Trillion” just because it’s easier to say than “2 point 3 Trillion”! Two syllables, three hundred billion dollars.