Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
There's a similar phenomenon with the word liberal. Liberal once referred to, and in some contexts still does, politics that advocates for human freedom from all kinds of government coercion. At least in the US, it has taken on a different meaning over the last hundred years. Now it refers to social-democracy.
Its one of the meanings that the word socialism has come to denote through quotidian usage in media and within Amercian society. Democratic Socialism would likely be a more precise term for these common usage scenarios.
see Usage Discussion of socialism at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
> Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.
In the UK, welfare as we know it here originated from the Liberal Party, in fairness. Nationalisation (attempted socialism by reform) was the hallmark of the Labour Party, not heavy welfare spending.
Since Thatcher, the Tories have a knack for presenting themselves as the thrifty party - in effect, living within our means. Except household budgets are not so analogous to government budgets. It just so happens that this line resonates with the everyday voter in times of economic woe and it's all too easy to paint the social democrat as a boundless spender.
An example: in 2007 the Tory Party's shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said he would match Labour's spending plans. Recession hits, tax revenues drop and they harped a very different tune.
It's honestly just politics.
And yet, the big stories of the last decade or two have noted a trend: more value being generated by fewer people with fewer capital expenditures (prime example being MSFT > Google > Facebook > Instagram/Whatsapp/Minecraft). The majority of "capital" in those cases (VC money, if applicable) is spent on engineering salaries.
Meanwhile, oil companies are dying, communication networks are barely profitable (cisco?), and "hard industry" is an industry no one optimizing for profitability wants to get into unless it's to break it up and sell it off. Of course you can point to the recently ended energy bonanza during which Exxon became the most valuable company in the world; explaining the drivers of that is beyond the scope of this comment but it's not about energy being a fundamentally awesome business to be in (but briefly, BRIC growth + monopolistic practices to really juice income).
So the interplay between brain capital, industrial equipment, and various other types of capital is more complex than "the public should own the means of production". Some of it yes, most of it no. And I'd argue the brain capital trend is going to continue while heavy industry jobs are going to keep disappearing, forcing us to resolve the "interplay between capital" question in a way that doesn't collapse our entire economy, doesn't cause a civil war (and/or avoids one), and doesn't end up with the public (or a small group calling themselves "the public") being able to shake down any success story simply because they figured out how to make more money than the next guy.
There is some particularly crazy thinking in philosophy on self-ownership, which may interest you:
Cécile Fabre, Whose body is it anyway? Justice and the integrity of the person
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/journal/v9/n3/full/cpt2...
Consider a trivial example -- the affect that the post ww2 public housing boom did to the US construction industry. Government procurement rules transformed and forced consolidation of the brick industry. On the east coast it went from hundreds of geographically diverse companies to 4-6, all in the south.
