Hey guys (and gals) read up a bit. Socialism isn’t about supporting the poor or giving charity. Socialism is about who owns the means of production. Who owns the steel mills? Who owns the farms? Who owns the apartment houses in the city?
The idea is that the State, as a representative of the people, owns these things, determines how they’re used, and spreads the wealth around fairly equally. “Giving charity” isn’t discussed. The idea is who owns what so that everybody gets a fair cut of the pie. In a large, complex economy socialism doesn’t work. A centralized economy is just too clumsy and unresponsive.
You can have a system which is out and out capitalist and which gives plenty of help to the poor. There is no rule that poor people have to starve to death under capitalism. In a capitalist society there will always be people who – often through no fault of their own (like children) – don’t have enough income to have a decent standard of living. It’s simple decency to make sure that such people have a reasonable standard of living – “reasonable” here of course not meaning a BMW and a Jacuzzi, but adequate food, adequate housing, health care, etc.
And as far as “communism OR capitalism” goes – most governments in rich countries are a mixture. The US is an example. The closest we’ve come to pure capitalism in the last century was under Greenspan, and the result was the mess we’re in now. NO system works by itself. It has to be supervised and tinkered with on a constant basis, because the only unchanging thing in economics is change itself.