Socialism CANNOT work.

I was in my teens when it first occurred to me that socialism simply could not work.There were demands for ever higher wages without higher productivity and that struck me as rather odd when you put this into the context of a small business where the owner could only ever gain a higher income with increased turnover.
The anomaly was clearly quite a serious one and once this point has been grasped the entire house of cards is obviously unable to function properly.
Against this backcloth, it was evident that socialists were heavily opposed to businesses earning profits which seemed to be regarded as fundamentally immoral. Absurdity was piled onto absurdity.
Add to this the fact that socialism supported 'big government', nationalisation et al to create employment, I struggled to see where the money came from.
Obviously enough, with nationalised industries actually designed to make a loss, the situation was getting ever more nonsensical and history showed that this was how socialism always failed when granted some power.
So. The taxpayer had to fund all of this and clearly money which was rotated, government to government employee and back to government would inevitably leave the circle incomplete and by quite some distance.
So. The money was to come from the private sector alone - which was to be taxed 'til the pips squeak' according to Denis Healey.
High taxes disincentivised business; drove investment away; caused a brain drain' and guaranteed an industrial downturn.
I know that the socialists never quite put it in those terms but that was the reality.
They spent money they did not have and when that ran out they printed it! They seemed surprised when inflation kicked in.
One 'intelligent' socialist I knew as a young man who had once been a Rotherham councillor said to me one day: "What harm has inflation ever caused you?" - Incredible - unless you were there to hear it, of course.
Incidentally, socialists rejected the EU as a 'capitalist conspiracy' until they began to see it as the best vehicle for attaining their own ends.