Since everyone’s already slapped your wrists for not being an anarcho capitalist, I’ll try to help you be a minarchist. Although they’re right. Its a lot easier if you aren’t also advocating the welfare state (free security for everyone! but no bread).
Argue incentives, incentives, incentives. Not just from the side of the recipients of state welfare, from the state itself. They pretend like government will automatically make all the right regulations and be nice. WRONG. The state has an incentive to serve its own interests. There are good reasons why democratic governments will fail to be controlled effectively by their citizens. Familiarize yourself with this argument very, very well.
Politicians will realize that they can simply buy votes by making citizens dependent on state welfare. So the government has no incentive to get people on their feet and self sufficient. Self sufficient people don’t need the government. And WOW have the great society and other progressive reforms been fantastic failures. See Thomas Sowell’s work on this.
Now that the welfare state (or states in general, but you don’t have to say that!) won’t work, go on the offensive. Capitalism never made anyone poorer. People left their jobs on farms to come to the city because the city offered better working conditions. Also see the pro-capitalist arguments here. Switzerland does not accept the huddled masses into its country. Bastions of wealth have been established by excluding the poor, not by increasing their standard of living.
Their argument basically reduces to bitching that under capitalism there are still going to be poor people, who were already poor before. And the people who are giving to charity are good but not good enough to provide for the poor, so even though the charitable class of society is always getting richer, it’s still somehow never going to be enough.
Anyway, how does capitalism make poor people wealthy? How does anyone become wealthy? Capital accumulation. Saving. An entrepreneur takes surplus, invests it in capital (like machines, training, infrastructure) in order to make even more profits. In doing so, he raises the productivity of workers, expanding output and driving prices down. Real wages go up.
Indeed, all socialists know how to do is redistribute wealth. Well, a minimum wage of $5/hr isn’t going to help anyone in a pre-industrialized economy. They would be at a total loss as to how to set up a society from scratch. They would see all the poor people, put them on welfare, and they’d all starve. End of humanity.
In short, you need to familiarize yourself with a lot of history over the industrial revolution and governments role in helping/hampering the economy and poor. You also need to be really good at solving free rider and public goods problems without the government, because sophisticated socialists are just going to argue that healthcare is a public good. It’s a lot of work. If you’re smart, you can just shoot from the hip using theory. You might even become an anarcho capitalist along the way…