Then why do you think there is such an immediate reaction from so many people if a moderate or conservative so much as says that Socialism isn't a desirable system of government?
Right on cue, there's the "Norway is nice" reply that sounds very much like an effort to defend Socialism.
You have to look at who falsely redefined the term first...
It was largely Reagan (even prior to his tenure as president) who popularized the notion that programs like social security and subsidized medicine were "socialism"
Well, history does show us that the slippery slope is real. Why go to such lengths to pretend that it doesn't happen? Put such power into the hands of government--which Socialism by definition does--and it is likely to lead to a denial of individual freedoms. There's no mystery about that.
Do you have an example of a former market economy, who's transition to socialism was because they started providing subsidized healthcare?
At this point, almost every developed capitalist nation provided taxpayer funded healthcare to some degree (even us). Yet, very few actual socialist countries still exist.
If the slope were as slippery as you claim, I would've expected Canada, the UK, and the majority of western Europe to be flying hammer & sickle flags at this point.
...and they are all Socialist states. Cuba wasn't behind the Soviets' Iron Curtain, but descended into poverty and totalitarianism strictly because of Socialism. It had been the most prosperous country in the region prior to Castro, however.
Castro certainly was an ally of the soviets... Fidel and Gorbachev were quite chummy.
And to pretend that Cuba was a beacon of greatness prior to Castro can be a tad misleading as well. They were a little better before him, but they certainly had their share of problems before him as they had had socialist leaders running that country prior to him, and the few that weren't socialist weren't really any less brutal than the socialists.
The fact that they were the "best in the region" is a meaningless distinction if the bar is so low for that region. It doesn't take much to be better than the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, and Haiti.
The conservative side claiming "every form of spending I don't like is socialism" is just as counter-productive as young millennials labeling market economies as "socialist" because they have free healthcare.