> You make it sound socialist invented healthcare, transportation and education when all those things existed long before the first socialist was born.

The UK NHS was invented by the UK Labour Party (socialists) after WW2. It was the first healthcare system in the world that provided free healthcare services to its citizens on the basis of citizenship rather than fee payment or insurance. So yes, in a way, they did invent the modern health care system. Before it, working class people could not afford to see doctors because everything was private like the mess they have over in America. There is a reason the British people are very, very attached to the NHS.

Roads are another example. If all roads were private they would all have tolls and you would have to pay for every single one you used, including the minor ones from your house to the main road. Instead we pool our taxes and maintain them collectively because everyone can see that doing otherwise would be madness. But in a completely free market capitalist society with no opposing ideology, the landowners would happily charge you for each individual road, just as they happily charge you for parking a car.

And education only used to be available to those whose parents could afford it. Collectively we decided this was a bad idea, so we created a school system where every child would receive an education, paid for out of taxes. In a free market capitalist society, this would not exist, and half the country would be illiterate, having received no education because their parents could not afford it.

You can’t remove the “ist” from the end of “social” and claim it is a different thing. These are socialist policies, that are paid for by collect taxes and redistributing them to those in need. Most of us agree that these are for the greater good and preferable to the free market equivalent. But we can also agree that we don’t need to nationalise the production of cars, or clothes or any number of other things because the free market capitalist ideologies do a good job in those industries.

The problem is not the ideology. The problem is applying the wrong model (ideology) to the wrong problem due to being overly attached to the model as well as bad actors exploiting loopholes in models and systems for their own gain.

I prefer to look at these ideologies as percentages. I don’t know what the numbers would truly be but for the sake of example you could say that 70-80% of scenarios call for capitalist solutions and 20-30% of scenarios call for socialist solutions. In the UK this tracks, as we tend to have more/longer periods of Conservative government than we do Labour. It also tracks with the folk wisdom of sticking with what has been proven to work for the majority of the time rather than trying something new.

> and there also a good reason why a lot of ex-socialist countries still have so many problems even after they nominally became capitalist.

Yes, because they have not developed the checks and balances in their political systems to contain extremists and exploiters so they become corrupted. For example, this is one of the reasons why Ukraine was not allowed to join the EU. According to Wikipedia, it still needs to reform its system in the following areas:

Brussels Requirements

reform of the Constitutional Court

continuation of judicial reform

anti-corruption

anti-money laundering

implementation of the anti-oligarchic law

harmonization of audiovisual legislation

change in legislation on national minorities

For what it’s worth, I do think some of that is a bit hypocritical, especially as until very recently the UK was a member of the EU and London probably launders more dirty money than anywhere else on the planet but that’s another discussion in itself.