Back in the 1920s the Progressive-Republican founder of The 20th Century Fund--now The Century Foundation—-Edward Filene argued that America did not need any flavor of "socialism". What it needed instead, he argued, was "welfare capitalism".

Socialism imposed heavy taxes and used the resulting revenue to provide for social welfare. In so doing it incurred all the efficiency losses of bureaucracy. It added to those the losses from coalition-building political logrolling. It added on to those the efficiency losses that ensued from decisions made by politicians responsible to voters who were by and large not the entrepreneurial job creators. More important, in his view, the redistributive part of the social insurance state was simply not necessary. The efficiencies of scale of modern mass production would guarantee that even an unequal society would be a society of general abundance and prosperity.

[...]