Socialism has become a four letter word for the conservatives. Socialism like free market capitalism doesn't exit, never will. No ideology has all the answers or solutions. America has many elements of socialism through stock ownership, employee ownership and social services such as Medicare. Unions once served as a socialistic force fighting for workers rights and ownership of the profits and products of their work. Capitalists and others have fought these elements of socialism for years now, especially after the New Deal. Humans are greedy and all that is required to stir them up is use words that are dog whistles for all sort of issues and ideas. A few quotes and book recommendations below for the thoughtful reader.
"a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
"Under capitalism the only thing the people own is the national debt." Marx
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." John Maynard Keynes
"Most interactions with people that you trust, people that you love, or people that just need to cooperate with on an immediate basis, take the form of “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” It doesn’t matter if you’re working for the government, working for a corporation, or working in your family; if you need to fix the toilet because it’s leaking and you say “Hand me the wrench,” the other guy doesn’t say “What do I get for that?” It’s not an exchange; people act according to their abilities to chip in. Ironically communism is applied because it’s the only thing that works; it’s the most efficient way to allocate resources. Thus I like to say that you could argue that capitalism is just a bad way of organizing communism." David Graeber
"Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2751831-invisible-hands
"Moreover, if we give the matter a moment's thought, we can see that the 20th century morality tale of 'socialism vs. freedom' or 'communism vs. capitalism' is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden), and plutocratic republics (the United States), whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think." Tony Judt 'Ill fares the Land'
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7821831-ill-fares-the-land
"Libertarian solutions favored by the political right have contributed even more directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and valued forms of communal life, particularly in the UK and the US. Far from producing beneficial communal consequences, the invisible hand of unregulated free-market capitalism undermines the family (e.g., few corporations provide enough leave to parents of newborn children), disrupts local communities (e.g., following plant closings or the shifting of corporate headquarters), and corrupts the political process (e.g., US politicians are often dependent on economic interest groups for their political survival, with the consequence that they no longer represent the community at large). Moreover, the valorization of greed in the Thatcher/Reagan era justified the extension of instrumental considerations governing relationships in the marketplace into spheres previously informed by a sense of uncalculated reciprocity and civil obligation. This trend has been reinforced by increasing globalization, which pressures states into conforming to the dictates of the international marketplace." Daniel Bell in
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/