I had a completely different draft for this post, but after a moment of consideration, I scrapped it. Too often I get into the weeds and write something of excessive length, discouraging more casual readers. So I will try to keep this one as short as possible.

Long story short, I had someone suggest a bunch of things were socialist in nature that, to me, obviously were not. I even took an informal poll on one of them, and other people largely agreed with me. So, I thought a top ten list might be a fun to list what things are not socialism, despite what people might claim.

First, a working definition of socialism: “A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”

This can be generally phrased as collective ownership and regulation. It’s rare to find any society that is entirely non-socialist or socialist. But that’s not our focus, anyways. We will be talking about concepts within societies rather than the societies themselves.

Oh, and some of these will seem like duplicates. I tried to come up with mainly unique items, but I had to take some creative liberties in the end. Gotta hit that sweet, sweet total of ten.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s begin.

1. Firefighters and Police

This is an argument I’ve seen play out between anarchists and other people a thousand times. Basically, people will assert that emergency services like police and firefighters are examples of good socialism making our lives better. Anarchists will contest that we could have privately funded and entirely voluntary law enforcement and emergency services, and it would likely perform better.

And… the Anarchists aren’t really wrong. The suggestion we need to funnel money through the government specifically to have a functioning societal defense is kind of silly if you think about it. There can be arguments made on whether private funding or tax based funding is better overall and why, but that’s null and void for this point. The fact that socialist policies only facilitate the funding of this makes it, at it’s core, neither pro nor anti socialist. People trying to claim these things are socialist are wrong.

2. Roads

Same vein as the previous argument. Roads existed before socialism, and they will exist after socialism is a distant relic of the past. Any private industry can build a road, so one cannot claim roads are a socialist creation, or require socialism in order to exist in a functional manner.

3. Government

This is another Anarchist argument I usually see, though this one I disagree with. Government is not inherently a socialist institution.

There are many different forms of governance. I’m partial to a republic, though one of a much different form than people typically think of. I believe in a limited government that is constrained to certain realms and no further, allowing people to live their lives with minimal obstruction. Socialism, meanwhile, is fundamentally premised on the majority having a large degree of control over the individual. This is wildly opposed to most well functioning and free societies, while free societies also will invariably have a well defined governing structure. So no, government is not socialist, even though you can still have a socialist government. In fact, the fact that there are specifically socialist governments implicitly confirms there is such a thing as a non-socialist government.

4. Charity

This is one of the more common misconceptions. Charity is absolutely not socialist, for one big reason. It is voluntary.

Socialism requires the collective ownership or regulation of things. More informally, it involves redistribution of accumulated wealth at the higher echelons to the lower classes. However, philanthropy is inherently capitalistic, as it involves very deliberate decisions on how to manage one’s own resources that are not dictated by popular demand. Socialists don’t get to take credit for this, as it is done every day without using political and legal pressure. It’s almost like the wealthy are people too, and many of them actually want to use their wealth to help others when those people are struggling.

5. Employee Benefits

This was the second most absurd suggestion I’ve ever heard. Employee benefits are NOT socialist.

Want to know why unions work? They are premised on competition. They stand together to increase their collective value to the institution, as having a large chunk or the entirety of your workforce quit or refuse to work is a larger disadvantage than firing one or two at a time. However, if the value those employees provide is lower than the cost of what they are asking for, the company will not and cannot comply.

Offering things like benefits, however, makes a company more competitive in hiring employees. Just like one company offering a common product at a lower price forces other companies to adapt or be out-competed, one company offering better benefits attracts more discerning applicants than companies offering worse benefits. Competition to facilitate the production/acquisition of the very best products and services is one of the most capitalistic ideas in existence, so the assertion that such a thing is socialist is laughable to me.

6. Consumer Protections

This builds on the competition example, as well as hearkening back to my previous point about only being potentially socialist in implementation. Sure, you can have regulation based on group consensus. Or you could have a legal system that very meticulously outlines what practices are legal or illegal. Law is not socialist, it is written by elected officials. Arguing that these elected officials are still socialist in nature due to being elected would then mean things like the free market are socialist. Which is patently absurd, given how much socialists wish to apply socialist constraints to the free market rather than simply allowing people to compete freely.

If a company scams people, it usually doesn’t stay profitable for long. If it does, then that’s usually caused by abusing regulation loopholes to use the law to their advantage, not by the fact that a proper regulation doesn’t exist. After all, word gets around, so if a company does shoddy work, it’s going to lose favor with the public.

7. The Nuclear Family

This was something that I used to consider socialist. After all, you got people working together for mutually beneficial goals. People are not required to contribute the same amount that they consume, as the children take more than they contribute while the parents and older children contribute more than they take, in general. What’s more interesting is this form of socialism, if we considered it to be that, actually works relatively well on a consistent basis.

But then I remembered that Karl Marx specifically wanted to destroy the nuclear family. He considered the institution inherently capitalist, and something that would be completely abolished under a true socialist regime. So that’s unfortunate. Chalk up yet another working system to capitalism instead of socialism, I guess.

8. Religious Institutions

This is another thing that Karl Marx specifically wanted to remove. He considered religion the “opiate of the masses”. So any sort of tithing or social organization caused by literally any religion? Not socialism. In fact, very much opposed to socialism. Which is, again, too bad. For all the crap that people give the religious, I’m fairly certain the statistics show they are happier, more generous, and more successful generally speaking.

9. Cryptocurrency

This was the single most puzzling thing I’ve seen called socialism. I could speak on this more thoroughly, but I will try to keep it brief.

Crypto fundamentally acts as a commodity designed to perform as a non-government backed currency. That is it. It does not give power to the people in any notable way that the free market with a hands off government wouldn’t give. As we stated before, the free market is not socialist. The ability for anyone to mine crypto is not socialism, as the actual servers mining crypto are privately owned. Sure, you could implement a specifically socialist form of crypto, but just like pretty much all forms of socialism…

I don’t expect that to end well.

10. Capitalism

I know, this last one is silly. But I feel it should still be said.

Socialists constantly try to take credit for the successes of capitalism. It is fundamentally based on taking money from the rich who gained that wealth under capitalism and redistributing it. The problem that socialists will never admit is that their system doesn’t build that wealth, it only drains it. It needs that wealth to work, and when it runs out… the system collapses in on itself. There is simply nothing to sustain it.

In a kind of philosophical sense, capitalism is a positive mindset. Your fate is in your own hands, and you are entitled to the sweat of your brow. Meanwhile, socialism is a negative mindset. It demands that you submit to the authority of the masses, and you will either succeed or fail based on their decisions rather than your own. This divide goes rather deep, and I could talk at length about it, but I will refrain for now.

I just wanted to be expressly clear on this last, slightly sarcastic, item. Capitalism works, and socialism is not capitalism.

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Same post on Minds.