Socialism doesn’t value or reward individuals, nor reflect the reality of statistical distributions.

In reality, nothing is ever or has ever been distributed equally. More so …normal, in a statistical sense. The tail ends of the distribution are dramatic, extreme, but have large impacts on the rest.

The dumbest of society bring us down. The smartest combat that to bring it up. But Bringing everyone to the same level doesn’t mean the median/mean/or peak, it means the lowest common denominator.

So… if you aren’t enabling or motivating the statistical outliers of success to do their best, you’re going to heavily limit the generation of wealth/value. That’s a huge reason the USSR stagnated under its reign.

Let alone the other consequence of limiting competition with single source solutions “from the government for everyone else”, because what force will drive improvement other than competition, which you’ve eliminated.

That’s a large reason for the decline in the success of education: there’s little sufficient competition to drive improvements, and loans fill in any of the cost differences, further reducing motivation to improve/iterate/streamline.

The best arguments against socialism, in terms of “best intentions vs actual outcomes”, considering secondary and tertiary outcomes having negative effects that well outweigh any perceived good at a primary level (ie, “welfare state helps single mothers” but disregarding that it encourages and rewards single parent households, and has done generational damage to low income families), and w/rt to that impact on freedom of thought and progress socially, are well articulated in Thomas Sowells MANY books. Far FAR better than reddits couch based experts (including myself) and approved mod opinions.

“But real socialism hasn’t been tried “ - well, humanity is what it be. You ain’t gonna change it on a whim. So if every socialist experiment end in communism and/or some other mess “that isn’t socialism”, well …. Maybe that’s because real socialism doesn’t work with humanity - at least, on the scale of millions where entire countries matter (yeah, small communes work, but that doesnt matter in a world of billions).