Many or most people seem to know/believe that socialism is bad. Yet the reason they give is almost invariably that the Soviet experience went very very poorly and that the U.S. experience was clearly much better.
This seems to be de facto evidence of socialism's inability to be a system of organization and of capitalism/libearlism's triumph.
In my studies of both economics and Catholic Social Teaching, however, I have found that many people don't really know why the Church rejects socialism and they also seem to think that welfare or gov't intervention in the economy of any kind is 'socialist'. I also think that Karl Marx gets a bad name for the 'experiment' played out in Russia. That 'Marxism' wasn't what Marx had in mind and that doesn't mean Marx's version was good, but he certainly didn't advocate the authoritarian, police state that was the USSR.
In fact, he really just wanted freedom for the workers from their employers. He wanted better working conditions, choices, and wages for the workers--he wanted them to stop being exploited. He believed that Capitalism would eventually end in Socialism because of its own contradictory nature--accumulation leading to the immiseration of the working class. That said, he was, I believe, misguided in a few ways.
So why, exactly, is Socialism bad?
From Centesimus Annus 12-15 by Pope John Paul II on Rerum Novarum, socialism, and the state:
The commemoration of Rerum novarum would be incomplete unless reference were also made to the situation of the world today.
This is especially confirmed by the events which took place near the end of 1989 and at the beginning of 1990.
