Socialism is an economic philosophy. The basic idea is that instead of letting people privately own businesses, either individually or collectively, businesses should all be owned by the state and operated publicly for the betterment of society.

The problem with this is that this economic philosophy is based on two rather shaky premises: taking people's stuff and telling people they can't do things.

In a free market economy, people own businesses; businesses are literally private property, just like your shoes or whatever. Every business you can think of (probably) is owned either by some person, or some small group of people, or by a whole lot of people each of whom owns some number of shares of that company. But however ownership is divided up, those businesses are private property, owned by people.

To convert that free market economy to a socialist economy, somebody — and it's gonna be the government — is gonna have to come in and take that property away from those people. And you know what? I'm one of those people. I'm part owner in McDonald's and PepsiCo and Exxon, to name a few examples; I own shares of those companies. If somebody wanted to convert us over to a socialist economy, the government would literally come to me and take my shares of those companies away.

This process is called nationalization and it's not some abstract, imaginary thing. It's happened. In 1938 Mexico nationalized their oil industry. The government of Mexico just decreed one day that all oil and gas reserves in Mexico belonged to the government. They set up a government-owned-and-run petroleum company called PEMEX and transferred all Mexican petroleum resources to it, including a bunch of assets — wells, refineries, trucks, even down to the office supplies — that had the day before belonged to American, British and Dutch companies. There was an immediate international boycott of Mexico and things were getting very bad, but then the war broke out and the Allies needed Mexican oil more than they needed restitution. So Mexico got away with it.

That's what socialism looks like when you get right down to it: People taking stuff that doesn't belong to them. And that's only the beginning. Because what does a Mexican do if he wants to get into the oil and gas business? He gives up and goes looking for work in another industry, is what he does, because competition is not allowed. It's against the law to start a petroleum business in Mexico. Or rather, it used to be; PEMEX, unsurprisingly, has been hugely uncompetitive so a couple years back Mexico opened the market a bit. But that's not socialism; that's the abandonment of socialism under market pressures. In a pure socialist economy, private enterprise is prohibited. Everything is state-owned, state-run. Want to start a business? Any business? Tough. Go get a job working second shift at the tractor factory instead. Until they close the tractor factory, anyway.

That's why the people who don't like socialism don't like socialism: When you boil it down, it's just a fundamentally immoral philosophy. It's based on the twin principles that taking people's stuff is okay and that telling people they can't make their own economic decisions is okay.

Now, a lot of people like to say that it's not really like that, that socialism has a bad reputation, that only extremists would take it that far. What people like that are really talking about is a mixed economy, which is exactly what we have. Our economy is not a pure free market; we have private hospitals, but we also have state-owned and state-run hospitals. We have private schools, but we also have state-owned and state-run schools. It's not a bad thing to have both sometimes, which is exactly why we have — have always had, will always have most likely — a mixed economy.

But make no mistake. Socialism, as a philosophy, is on very shaky ground at best, and at worst is downright malicious.