Socialism isn’t a single system—it’s a spectrum.
On one end you’ve got social democracies like Sweden, where capitalism runs the economy but taxes and welfare make it fairer. In the middle are democratic socialists, who want workers and communities to have more say in how industries are run. On the far end are command economies like the USSR, where the state controlled everything. So when Americans call free healthcare or public schools “socialism,” they’re really just describing the mild, democratic kind that already exists in every developed nation—including the U.S.
Eliminating the profit incentive, and all of the parasitic executives absorbing the profit, will always be more efficient than a system that demands waste.