If not "socialism", what should we call "spending tax dollars on things that help everyone"

[fishwax]

88. Here's how the Oxford Dictionaries define it

1A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

1.1 Policy or practice based on the political and economic theory of socialism.

1.2 (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.

The term ‘socialism’ has been used to describe positions as far apart as anarchism, Soviet state Communism, and social democracy; however, it necessarily implies an opposition to the untrammelled workings of the economic market. The socialist parties that have arisen in most European countries from the late 19th century have generally tended towards social democracy

This dictionary definition, with the use of "or regulated" is pretty clearly in line with the usage in American political discourse going back well over a century. Every significant government regulation of industry, from the idea that coal mines shouldn't be able to purchase the labor of eight-year-olds in extremely dangerous conditions to the minimum wage to the requirement that employees provide access to health care has won the label, in the halls of congress and on the editorial pages of newspapers across the country.

The funny thing is that it has historically been conservatives who have used this term to attack policies that they don't like. And for decades, they have successfully fought against a wide variety of public interventions into the private operation of capital by simply referring to any such intervention as socialism. Now, though, the tactic has backfired and the tide is turning, because the rising generations, who don't have the psychological baggage of growing up during the Cold War, aren't as predisposed to see anything labeled socialism as problematic. So they hear conservatives use terms like socialism to refer to Universal Health Care and they think: I'm cool with that. And so you have millennials who are predisposed to like socialism, because (thanks mostly to conservative attacks) they associate it with things like the nordic model.