What we call “Socialist” is almost never more than a fundamental belief in fairness of opportunity constrained by moral and practical concerns in varying degrees across the spectrum. This leads to a heap of individual beliefs that, though they may be palatable and feel good, are hopelessly inconsistent.
If we want to go after inequality in opportunity as such, the way to do it is not by handing out healthcare and welfare and social security. These completely miss the fundamental engenderer of inequality by decades. The only consistent application of the Socialist ideal is to create and nationalize a child-raising industry, removing that right from their parents.
Ultimately, no argument for the redistribution of wealth cannot be applied and applied better to public childcare. If one requires a certain amount of capital to “get off the ground” economically, how much more does a child require a certain baseline of care to succeed in life? If a man’s economic situation in a free economy is the fault of external factors like exploitation and oppression, how much more is his disposition the fault of external factors like poor parenting? Essentially, where redistributionists want to level the economic starting point after the fact, the consistent socialist knows that the starting point can only be leveled at birth.
The only solution, then, is national standards in childcare. Each child is raised in the same manner, and from there chooses his path in life, allowing his natural talent and disposition to shine through. With each child raised in the exact same manner, the rest of the economy could be quite free, as every child has exactly the same starting point. Parents may not bestow any resources upon their children except as a donation to the general pot, for one child may not be given an “unfair” or “unnatural” advantage over the rest, whether developmentally from loving care, or through resources.
The solution, in short, is complete homogenization. This is the essence of the Socialist aesthetic: individualism is threatening, both economically and politically. To engage in a brief reductio ad absurdum, this principle could even be taken so far as to outlaw free procreation and force sterilization, as free choice in pairings engenders inherent genetic inequality as well. It would also make the business of illegal child-rearers easier to deal with if they can’t have children at all, but this is only speculation for a time when technology would allow this to be widely feasible (though it is hardly unimaginable that the capability lies in our power, should the people be complicit).
The rest of the Socialist ideal, however, is independent of technology. Though the government may (and probably will) still have a safety net for those who make especially poor decisions anyway, there is no longer any excuse for redistribution. In fact, no real theory of political economy can have redistribution as an ideal, for even if we accept that the ills it purports to fix are indeed ills, it is only an ad hoc solution; a bandage that tries and fails to represent itself as part of a more generally applicable principle.
So, to those who would advocate Socialist policy to remedy inequality, stop piddling around with inconsistent feel-good ideas about ex post redistribution and take your ideas to their logical conclusion. Unless, of course, that reveals your moral and just ideals to be unacceptably immoral and unjust.
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