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Socialism is a policy of reinvesting the surplus value towards the workers and members of the society instead of hogging it as profit in the pockets of individuals. Profits get reinvested but not necessarily properly.
In a socialist state, the workers have a say in how the products they create are managed and how the funds resulted from their commercialization are reinvested. This directly leads to a policy of bettering the lives of said members of society via healthcare, disability insurance, retirement funds, civic resources, etc. Because the previously mentioned benefits are for the workers, by the workers, they are to be state owned and managed, and not private. None will operate on a profit-making basis, but on a betterment of said services. Social housing, lack of homelessness is also included.
Socialism isn't about banning guns, not being patriotic, it's about bettering the lives of people and reducing class differences by pushing the minimum standard of living upwards.
Abolishing private property is indeed a concept - in a socialist state you should not have massive landowners that only offer spaces of living with small investments to people who must pay rent towards them, and have that as their main source of income. Private property does not mean personal property though people should probably read Marx or some neo-Marxists to further understand this difference.
Medicare or a sort of state-owned healthcare institution which guarantees access to healthcare to its citizens without directly paying (taxes to fund said institution is not direct payment) would be considered a socialist type of action. Even so, Bernie is the only mildly socialist politician that I know in the US.
Socialism does not work though as a small tree in a capitalist forest - running a socialist state means costs reflect reality and do not get compensated by the extremely complicated and, in a sense, delusional stock market and investing that actually happens. The socialist state will get financially slaughtered by the capitalist ones but not because it is an intrinsically better system.
For example, the American (or most places on Earth) real estate market does not make sense - X land gets valued at a particular sum but requires a consistent rise in valuation in order to create profit for the investors, do a degree that few people actually have access to it. You can have one or two but NY City is filled with extremely expensive locations that no normal business can properly rent and still make a profit from whatever they sell without raising costs that make their own products much more expensive than what they actually are worth. This becomes problematic, because the answer is "buy less" for the one who wants said product but cannot afford it , as that also reduces the profit of said business which brings them back to them not being able to keep renting the place that requires a consistent rise in valuation in order to be profitable.
I'm not a socialist nor a capitalist so I'm not shilling for either - both are in my opinion not good for the long term as we live in a finite world with finite resources. It only took us 200 years to become overpopulated but we still refuse to acknowledge the disaster that overpopulation is. "The Great Depression" and the recovery from it should not make us optimistic either - it was an artificial crisis created by the stock market and not a resource-based one. Once we hit a proper crisis we will fully understand how deeply fucked we are.
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