What Socialism means
Socialists tend to oppose large corporations and the ultra-wealthy most of the time. It's against giving rich people the Freedom to take advantage of the rest of us which is good. Dictionaries and Encyclopedias define socialism as an economic system where the means of production are communally owned with at most a small private sector. In practice, Scandinavia and other social democratic systems are also sometimes called socialist.
More radical socalism
Other types of socialism involve replacing the capitalist class alltogether. Advocates of this type of socialism wants to see production controlled by the state, by municipal authorities, alternatively they want to see workers running their own industry or consumer cooperatives. There is certainly scope for state enterprise, municipal enterprise workers cooperatives, consumer cooperatives in a social demoratic system that workes but replacing the whole of industry with such systems does not work in practise. Even countries like communist China find it better to keep or reintroduce a private sector.
Right-wing scare tactics
Because many people think badly about Communism, conservatives often pretend socialists are communists. This is a right-wing scare tactic sometimes called Red-baiting. Something similar is calling Obama a Socialist which is not true. Conservatives often claim that Socialism makes people lazy because the wealth gets "spread around" so much. They may also claim that Socialism does not work, when in fact, the 4 countries in Europe with the highest work ethic are all run by democratic socialists or Social Democrats, the two ideologies sometimes overlap. Socialism IS NOT the same as COMMUNISM, and neither communism or socialism is the same as Orwellianism. (Orwell was in fact a socialist!) Communism is socialism taken to the extreme, and saying that socialism is as bad as communism (we're looking at you, conservatives) is just a bit like saying stubbing your toe is as bad as the Holocaust.
Also the right calls many ideas they oppose socialist to put people against those ideas. For example Universal Health Care is called socialist. Universal health care can be part of a socialist system but many capitalist nations also have universal health care. People in nations with universal health care are on average healthier and live longer than people in nations without it. Socialists want universal health care but you don't have to be a socialist to want it.
Things Socialists can do:
- Free the people
- Get justice for the hard-working (A lot of the rich are hard-working and they should keep some of the wealth they generate but not all. The hard-working majority of the poor deserve far more than they get.)
- Get laid
- Get nasty to Fascists like Nazis and Klansmen
- Not commit human rights abuses
- Be peaceful
- Prove Neocons wrong in their imaginations
- Ally with Liberals to save the world
- Abolish the death penalty
- Treat Women as equals (What Saudi Arabian women need by a magnitude)
- Treat minorities and immigrants as equals
- Treat Homosexuals as equals
- End wars
- Replace unrestrained, deregulated capitalism with something better
- Tax the sh*t out of the extremely wealthy (If they work hard, they just get it back)
- Introduce Universal health care. Social democrats can also introduce universal health care as can people who just want to improve capitalism.
- Be social(ists)
- Posses a brain All humans need to get smarter
- YBe superior to communists (Oh wait, pretty much everyone including conservatives can do that, way too easy)
