No one ever said anything about infinite money. The basic idea of socialism is that democracy should control some of the allocation of labor and that, because the functions of the nation state are necessary to the health of enterprises and because the fundamental purpose of society is the common good, the state has a right to some of the profits, which go beyond merely taking money from the wealthy.

Plenty of nation-states make different trade offs between productivity or growth or whatever and mitigating poverty. To act as if the particular style we have in America is the only possible thing that works is asinine.