Ask ten men what socialism is and you will get ten answers. A few of them will be describing communism. A few will be describing Denmark. Almost none of them will be describing socialism. Capitalism does not fare much better. It gets used to mean everything from a corner store to a hedge fund. These three words show up in nearly every political argument in the country and the men having the argument are almost never working from the same dictionary.

Here is what makes it simple. Capitalism and socialism are two different answers to the same question. Communism is not a third answer to that question. It is where socialism was supposed to end up once it had done its work.

The question is who owns the means of production. That phrase sounds like a textbook so throw it out and use the plain version. Who owns the factories, the farmland, the machines, the office buildings, and the companies. Not your house. Not your truck. Not the money in your account. The things that get used to make other things and turn a profit. Each of these systems is a different answer to that one question.

Capitalism says private people own them. You can buy a business. You can buy land. You can buy a share of a company and own a sliver of it from your phone during lunch. Prices and wages come out of what people are willing to pay and accept. Government sets the rules and collects taxes but it does not own the plant. The whole selling point is the chance to own something. That is what gets men to build. Competition is what gets them to build well. The case against it is that ownership stacks up over time. The people who already own end up holding a great deal more than the people doing the work.

Socialism says the public owns them instead. Not you personally. All of us together, usually through the government. Nobody takes a private profit off another man's labor because there is no private owner there to take it. The whole selling point is that the men doing the work should be the ones who get the value of it. The case against it is that when nobody in particular owns the thing, nobody in particular has much reason to run it well.

Now the part that causes most of the yelling. When an American says socialism he is usually picturing Denmark. Free college, doctor visits that cost nothing, and a year of paid leave when you have a kid. That is not socialism. Denmark is a capitalist country. Private people own the companies there the same way they own them here. What Denmark has is very high taxes. That tax money is what pays for all of it. The name for that arrangement is social democracy.

The Danes got tired enough of being used as the example that their prime minister flew to Harvard in 2015 to say so out loud. Lars Løkke Rasmussen told the room, "I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy." He went on to describe his own country as a successful market economy with a large welfare state sitting on top of it.

That welfare state has a price and the Danes do not hide it. The top income tax rate there runs near sixty percent. There is a twenty-five percent tax on nearly everything you buy. Taxes take close to half of everything the country earns in a year. Here it is closer to a quarter. So the Nordic argument is a real argument and worth having. It is just not an argument about who owns the factory. It is an argument about the tax rate. When an American politician calls himself a democratic socialist, that is almost always the argument he is actually making.

Which leaves communism. Karl Marx was a German writer in the 1800s and he never treated socialism and communism as rivals. He treated them as two stops on the same road. Socialism was the stop along the way. Workers take the government, take the factories, run things themselves for a stretch. Communism was the destination. No classes. No money. No government at all. Everybody owns everything in common and the state dissolves because there is nothing left for it to do.

Nobody ever arrived. The Soviet Union, China under Mao Zedong, Cuba under Fidel Castro. Every one of them called itself a socialist state on the way to communism. The full name of the Soviet Union was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The state was supposed to fade out on its own. In every case, it did the exact opposite and grew stronger. What those governments did next is the heaviest thing anyone brings into this argument. It is worth naming rather than waving at.

In China, the Great Leap Forward forced farming into collectives and produced a famine that ran from 1958 to 1962. Estimates of the dead run from fifteen million to forty-five million. The range is that wide because the records are poor and historians are still arguing about it. In the Soviet Union, the famine of 1932 and 1933 killed somewhere between three and a half and five million people, most of them in Ukraine. At least three quarters of a million more were shot in the purges that followed. Roughly one and a half million died in the labor camps. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed something close to a fifth of the entire population in under four years.

Notice what most of those numbers are. They are not firing squads. They are famines, produced by governments that took the farms and then kept collecting grain, after the harvest had already failed.

So the whole board is small enough to hold in your head. Capitalism and socialism are two answers to one question about ownership. Social democracy is capitalism with a much bigger tax bill. Communism is the finish line socialism was aimed at and never reached. Most of the men throwing these words across a table are using them as insults rather than descriptions. Knowing the difference tells you something useful in about five seconds. It tells you whether the guy across from you is arguing about a tax rate or arguing about whether anybody should be allowed to own a company at all. Those are not the same conversation.