At the national level it’s because they(the federal government) is taking your tax money to pay someone hundreds of miles away for existing. At the local level it’s because “private charity already does that.”

It gets really hard to make money and exploit people when they don't fear for their livelihoods.

Only if you're in the military or a billionaire.

I think it’s fear. People fear that their country doesn’t produce enough and isn’t wealthy enough to support an army that is capable enough to keep any real or imagined enemies at bay. Add a good amount of corruption and propaganda to it, and you get a perpetual cycle where this fear needs continuous fuelling.

The worst part of it is that the fear isn’t entirely unjustified. As the Ukraine war shows, predators will try to pray on the weak, and Europe has been complacent about its own defence.

That doesn’t mean I think capitalism is the answer of course, but it is a horribly delicate balancing act to consider all concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

It's pretty much all US propaganda that makes people hate socialism

Socialism’s critics believe that people who receive government aid become reliant on it and cease making an effort to become self-sufficient.

As someone who works in community mental health, I sadly have to admit that those criticisms aren’t entirely false. Ironically, I think the fact that the government organizations that implement these social safety nets being underfunded contributes to the problem. Because it takes so long to obtain benefits like disability (SSD/I in America), people don’t want to risk getting a job, potentially losing it, and having to go through the long, arduous disability application process again. So they just learn to be content living on disability pay and food stamps.

But that’s disability. I don’t think the same applies to just public assistance (which you can’t live off of) and SNAP.

Anyway, despite there being a kernel of truth in said criticisms, they’re largely off-base. I think a lot of the critics also confuse socialism with communism, and don’t realize that all most socialists desire is a system like European countries have, which is proven to work and not threaten capitalism. Then there are the really sick fucks who believe in social Darwinism and genuinely think poor people deserve to be so, and that it would be just for them to die off. But thankfully, those are in the extreme minority.

I think most of the hate is from hard working people who are afraid "lazy ones" will get benefits that they themselves deserve.

I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)

We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.

Ask a typical American what they hate about socialism and they will perfectly describe capitalism

It is due to lobbying and astroturfing.

Simple as.

It's definitely not based in data, because that overwhelmingly shows massive economic and happiness growth happens in these states

Personally I don't mind "social safety nets".

But for me the issue is that I work hard to have, and to continue having a nice life for my family and I. I took the risk, I invested in myself, and made the right choices over and over again. There should be a reward for that.

And while I don't think people should be homeless and starving, I'm realistic enough about the current politics (of both parties) to know that the wealthy won't be the ones to pay for it, it will be weaponized to drive the wealth gap further apart.

Sure in a perfect world billionaires would be taxed (and actually have to pay), and we could provide all this wonderful socialism everyone here wants, but that's never actually going to happen and I don't feel like paying even more taxes to watch the funds disappear into the already massive (and misused) budget.

Perhaps a comment against it could be something like “why should I pay for someone else’s health care?”.

I guess if your beloved leader has told you enough times that socialized health care is bad (communism?), then you won’t investigate what that kind of health care really looks like, and you’ll parrot the statement in belief and acceptance.

If everyone does better, then you're doing worse by comparison.

I want 10% unemployment and 0% interest rates. That's the magic formula where I can sexually harass my au pair and she has no choice but to put up with it.

A lot of people mix up “socialism” with “people being good neighbors.” That’s not actually what the term means. Socialism is specifically about who owns the big stuff, the means of production. In a socialist setup, people still work jobs, they still get paid, and daily life still involves employment and compensation. The difference is that major industries aren’t privately owned by large corporations. They’re controlled collectively by the public or by the workers themselves.

Small private businesses can still exist; they’re not eliminated outright. What changes is the ownership of large-scale systems: energy, manufacturing, transportation, resources, things on that level. These are shifted away from private corporate control and toward collective control.

The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn't and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it's significantly more "successful".