Why are most democracies today socialist?

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In other words, natural selection was doing its job. The social safety net is our genetic undoing as a species.

Tell that to those who identify as conservatives and Judeo-Christian. I'm neither.

I live in a social democracy. I'd like to point out that these countries are becoming less and less socialist, and part of that has to do with immigration. Also, no capitalist system can escape the law of compounding interest - there needs to be some pretty drastic redistribution going on to counteract its effect.

It's really a question of how comfortable people are with the idea of poverty; do you think some people (including their children) deserve it or not? Do you think that even though people don't deserve it, it's really not something you are responsible for? It has a lot to do with whether you identify with your nation or not. But people who receive a lot of help from their state tend to identify more with it.

I've been giving it some thought and I think I can frame my argument better.

There are many aspects of an economy where there is a lot of room for innovation. For these goods and services, a private run open market with health competition (no monopolies) will tend to force the providers to innovate on price, quality, and fit with peoples needs (or at least wants).

There are some goods and services, however, that are just flat commodities with little room for innovation. In these, there tends to be a race to the bottom, and the economies of scale tend to produce draconian monopolies. In these cases, it makes more sense for the government to take over.

Highways fall into the latter. You can only have one road on a given patch of land. Maintaining it isn't likely to be a viable business, and there's no way to have competition.

Similarly, you can argue that trains fall into the latter as well, although they are often run as a public/private partnership.

Airplanes have a lot of room for innovation in routes, timetables, organization, services and interior design. We have a lot of private companies in the US providing flight services on local, regional, national and international scales.

Health care is a special case. You health care decisions aren't (or at least shouldn't be) economically motivated. They are ideally based on the best current evidence for the efficacy and safety of the available treatments. That means that while there is a lot of innovation in medicine, it's not of an economic nature. You should be picking you surgeon based on their track record with the procedure, not the quality of their latest advertising campaign or whether they honor coupons. In this situation, the economies of scale offered by a single system win out.

Another "Invisible socialism" that we've had in the US for a while are the national labs. Thomas Edison invented the modern industrial laboratory. Toward the end of his career he pointed out to government officials that there were some developments that they couldn't trust the private sector to develop. Private labs are inherently risk averse, and will avoid projects that are either too big or take too long. Under his advice, government labs like Naval Research Lab, Sandia National Labs, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and DARPA were born. They're the primary reason we have things like the internet (DARPA), atomic clocks (NIST), GPS (NRL, but requires NISTs atomic clocks), PHP (NIST), Satellite communications, etc.

America could afford socialism if they didn't bankrupt themselves fighting someone elses war in the middle east which has resulted in trillions of debt with interest that is impossible to pay back.

Here in Norway, we can, or could, afford socialism because we don't spend so much money on "foreign policies" and have had a surplus from the petroleum industry. But the petroleum industry is gradually being phased out, and a large portion of immigrants are instant welfare clients, so the welfare bubble will burst eventually. The standard of living is already decreasing, and will continue to do so.

The welfare state has been operating under the false surplus of the petroleum industry, assuming it will last forever. Even if it wasn't being phased out, it is a non-renewable resource. When the welfare state is set up to operate under an imaginary surplus that could be exhausted overnight, there is not enough time to adjust, and it will collapse.

Perhaps phasing out the petroleum industry gradually is the common sense thing to do, because then the welfare poicies can be adjusted accordingly so as to avoid a sudden and brutal collapse.

These are important aspects to consider. Proponents of socialism are often idealists, failing to take into consideration "money in, money out", and the problem of welfare states often seem to be a lack of planning around sustainable and long term sources of income. Fossile fuels are anything but that.

If America wasn't so hell bent on being world police, they could probably afford Obamacare. Heck, you'd be hard pressed to come up with any argument against it once the constant drain in the economy that is warmongering is no longer there.

Let them fight their own wars.