Guaranteed public education
Public transportation
Fire departments
Police departments
Public libraries
Every branch of the US military
Roads & highways
Social Security
Medicare/medicaid
Public, not private prisons & jails
Public hospitals
The Veterans Affairs Administration
Public universities
Public parks
Public toilets
Public drinking fountains
Public parking
Public everything.
We live in a hybrid society, along with every other society in the world to their own varying degrees. I do not think a country in the world exists without, at the bare minimum, police, firefighters, libraries, and public roads. Socialism essentially boils down to the things that the citizens demand and the leaders must deliver lest they be deposed. These deliveries can only be done through taxation, hence socialism is when everyone puts capital in the pool for the benefit of all. Here’s one people rarely take note of; state lotteries. That, my friends, is purely socialistic even though the results are capitalistic windfalls to the winner.
It’s impossible in practice to be a society of purely private ownership, and the ones that have tried full public ownership have generally been disasters. The misconception that everyone sees day in and day out is the equating socialism to communism, in which the state controls the means of production and nothing else. Socialism =/= Communism =/= Collectivism. None of those words are synonymous and one of them has nothing to do with economics, yet some people cannot, or refuse to understand the distinction.
Full disclosure; I am not of the left. I am not of the right. I’m a centrist liberal and I’m one that fails to see the harm in the scale of socialism common throughout liberal democracies. In fact, every incident of this country nearly collapsing that doesn’t involve war have been capitalist bungles, not socialist ones.
