Paul Dowling has referred to socialism as: “government-Induced slavery in the name of the general welfare.”* After a couple decades of socialist indoctrination, an apparent majority of American students from their K12 days through the university have now come to endorse and support what Dowling refers to as “government-induced slavery.” They think of themselves as socialists. 
Thus there are now more socialists in the world and in the United States. Interestingly, however, there is no longer any real socialism in the world. My book, Socialism, reviews a hundred years of European history in demonstrating why and how we now have many socialists, but no socialism!
*Paul Dowling, “What Do Democrats & Republicans Believe, & Just What Is a Free Republic All About?” http://eaglerising.com/47186/what-do-democrats-republicans-believe-just-what-is-a-free-republic-all-about/ Eagle Rising, 9/15/2017.
Dowling’s point is that socialist thinking has made government over-reach seem natural in political life today. There has always been a place for the government to provide public services, i.e., those services such as national defense, state highways and infrastructure, police and fire services, etc., but a graduated income tax for the purpose of income redistribution and the institution of the welfare state under Lyndon Johnson provide political justification for the pursuit of socialist policies that have become ever more popular in the absence of real socialism. This has enabled the promotion of “freedom-killing socialist beliefs by many in government, media, and academia.”
Once, socialism was a term for an economic system that:
1) demanded the nationalization of industry. All business was to be owned and controlled by the government. Socialism also
2) insisted that all economic activity be based on a governmentally-designed and -directed economic plan; it also
3) mandated governmentally-controlled and -directed industrial regulation through a large, omnipresent bureaucracy. When these economic policies and strategies failed, the system simply
4) diverted its focus to social policies. Socialists have long enjoyed threatening and attacking the established, culture-based traditions that had been the social glue of nations for centuries. Originally, in the early socialist years of the Marxian era, social traditions such as marriage were under attack.
Traditional social policies were considered the creations of and glue for bourgeois society. The view was that the “haves” of society had made the social rules and imposed them on the “have nots.” To “expropriate the expropriators” it was important for the socialists to destroy the old traditions and build new ones for the new order.
In a later era, it appears that social policy, once a mere footnote to the more significant economic policy, became a set of hot items to constitute part of a political platform and substitute for economic policies that had proven ineffective and undesirable. For example, after World War II, all socialist countries felt it essential to
follow the example of Josef Stalin and develop a national economic plan. Gradually, it became apparent that this effort added nothing to economic performance. One should not have expected that one gargantuan, state economic plan could be detailed and complex enough to replace the millions of individual plans that are developed formally and informally by the myriad of individual firms and consumers that comprise the national economy in a market system. So when one drops the national plan from the socialist party’s political platform, it can easily be replaced, for example, by the feminist movement. 
Another substitute for traditional socialist economic policies is simply an expansion of the entitlements of the welfare program, such as providing free secondary education or cancelling student debts.
All of the traditional economic pillars of socialist policy failed. Nationalization didn’t work because the
parliament, charged with the management of the nation’s industries, did not have time to manage the many thousands of firms involved. That would mean hiring managers who would act for the state, but may in practice be inclined to pursue their own personal interests rather than the interests of all the citizens. So there would have to be a national review from time to time of the state-owned firms’ performances. That all worked very poorly, so the alternative was simply to rely on a large bureaucracy to regulate all the activities of the private firms. Thousands of bureaucrats could then drown the private managers in an avalanche of rules and red tape, raising production costs and the prices we consumers pay as those costs are passed on to us.
Today, socialism consists only of 1) bureaucratic regulation of industry, 2) extensive social policies including welfare statist entitlements and legalizing and endorsing traditionally anti-social private activity. Where the latter involves mutually-acceptable personal activity of adults this seems reasonable and acceptable to tolerant and peace-loving individuals in the community. What is more troublesome is the increasing proclivity to push, for example, for the coming social acceptance of pedophilia. In any case, the final and fundamental pillar of contemporary socialism is 3) the redistribution of income.
The Nature of Socialism Part II
Income Redistribution
Individuals opposed to socialism find income redistribution unjust. This is based on the hypothetical case of a person wanting to help a poor old woman by giving her money. To acquire the needed funds, however, the benefactor robs you at gunpoint. This simply forces you to be “charitable” by constraining you to use the fruits of your labor for redistribution to someone else to whom they do not belong.
Although charitably helping others is a virtue to be encouraged, when government raises taxes in order to provide government relief, the taxpayer cannot control the level of giving, and individuals also lose their ability to provide charity to the recipients they would choose. First, the government-provided charity forces productive people to work for unproductive people. Second, politicians inevitably vote to award charity to people who are not truly in need, in order to win their votes. The structure of welfare programs such as social security is designed to win the support of taxpayers by including them both as payers and recipients in the plan. The program thus becomes very expensive with basically everyone being entitled, and the entire nation begins a process of drifting toward insolvency. Politicians support defined groups in exchange for votes. Those opposed to the socialist system of charity for votes are not really supporting charity, but a form of pay-for-play corruption.
Correct Principles of Government and the US Constitution
Socialists always call for “democracy” and rail against those who, according to them, are not permitting our “democracy” to function. But the word “democracy” does not appear anywhere in America’s founding documents. The United States governmental system is not a democracy so much as a republic. Republicanism is based upon the Constitutional view that the government follows a set of consistently applied, universal principles, rather than upon the notions of fleeting majorities who may wish to tyrannize over minorities. The Constitution is intended to promote liberty, not democracy. The Constitution protects the rights of individuals’ from their own government, as well as from their fellow citizens. Thus, the Constitution establishes distinct, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect the rights of the individual. It is for this reason that the government’s size and functions were strictly limited to those not granted to states. Every American is thus equal – equally protected against the mob tyranny into which 
democracy has the potential to descend. The government is the agent of the society’s individuals and it has no right to possess or implement any power to harm one individual or group in order to help another individual or group.
If all Americans thought it right to let the government run the agencies of charity, taking it out of the hands of the people, perhaps it would be appropriate to let the government take care of all of those who couldn’t (or who chose not to) take care of themselves. That would be sad, however, for those who wish to take care of their own children or their own parents. Perhaps income redistribution is the choice of most Americans today, even of those who lose control over those funds which they could otherwise use for their own charitable impulses. It is clear in any case that the government’s choices lead to the dependence rather than the self-reliance of recipients. It is clear that in the presence of welfare-state entitlements, the demand for charitable services will ultimately far exceed the supply generated by available funds, given the presence of budgetary needs for other, non-welfare policies. These and other problems are also discussed in another blog on this site entitled “The Failed Welfare Policies of Socialism.” The economics of income redistribution and welfare policies are presented in detail in the book Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States.
It should be noted from recent natural and terror disasters that Americans are willing, even anxious to help those in need. If those welfare transfers organized by government were left on a voluntary basis and were combined with the efforts of well-organized private agencies, generous Americans might even be able to meet legitimate charitable needs without relying on governmental redistribution of incomes.