What is socialism? Here's an easy analogy someone let me borrow from another MB.
"Then let's state things clearly.
Socialism is when the government controls all the means of production. That is, when all industry is state run.
In a variation of socialism, the means of production can be privately operated, but all products and profits are state controlled.
Taxation is not socialism. If you own a flower shop, and the government comes to your flower shop and picks up all of your flower arrangements and distributes them throughout society as the government sees fit, that would be socialism. If you sell those flower arrangements yourself, and the government comes around and collects the ENTIRETY of your profits and distributes them throughout society as the government sees fit, that would be socialism. If you and all your co-workers were government employees working at a state run flower shop, arranging flowers and distributing them as the government sees fit, that would be socialism.
Selling flowers and then paying proportional taxes on the profits made by selling those flowers is not socialism.
If you believe that income tax is a dangerous step towards the total appropriation of revenue by the government, then John McCain is a socialist. Reagan was a socialist. Almost every president since the civil war was a socialist. Ironically, if you equate the level of income tax with the degree of socialism, the US becomes a hole of socialism and Russia is a socialism-free paradise. "