"Government" and "socialism" are terms with different definitions

I'd not seen the particular meme discussed by Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO, but I've seen plenty like it, and encountered the basic argument on social media. And I fully expect that I'll run across this one.

Here it is:

Socialist programs in the U.S.: The Department of Agriculture, Amber Alerts, Amtrak, Public Beaches, Public Busing Services, Business Subsidies, The Census Bureau, The CIA, Federal Student Loans, The Court System, Dams, Public Defenders, Disability Insurance, The Department of Energy, The EPA, Farm Subsidies, The FBI, The FCC, The FDA, FEMA, Fire Departments, Food Stamps, Garbage Collection, Health Care, Public Housing, The IRS, Public Landfills, Public Libraries, Medicare, Medicaid, The Military, State and National Monuments, Public Museums, NASA, The National Weather Service, NPR, Public Parks, PBS, The Peace Corps, Police Departments, Prisons and Jails, Public Schools, Secret Service, Sewer Systems, Snow Removal Services, Social Security, Public Street Lighting, The Department of Transportation, USPS, Vaccines, Veteran Health Care, Welfare, The White House, The WIC Program, State Zoos.

You no doubt have also run into those smartasses who think they have successfully conflated government with socialism.

Let's remember what socialism is: government control or ownership of the means of production.

Cooke parses the above list of governmental activities and determines this:

. . . of the 55 items listed, I can count only a handful that have anything whatsoever to do with the abolition of private property, the nationalization of industry, the central planning of the economy, or “the governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution.” The vast majority are either “public goods” (i.e. “non-excludable” and “non-rivalrous” offerings such as the CIA, the FBI, the police, the military, the courts, street lights, public monuments, roads, sewers, etc.); quotidian government operations of the sort that are found in all political and economic systems (the Census Bureau); services that, in practice, can really only be provided or operated by the state (the IRS, the Secret Service, prisons, the White House); services that can feasibly be provided privately but toward which governments are inevitably tempted (NASA, the postal service, garbage collection); or welfare provisions that, while certainly redistributive in nature, are not necessarily “socialistic.”

There is a world of difference between saying, as Madison did, that, because men are not angels they need government, but that due to its having, by definition, a monopoly on the coercive use of power, it must be kept as small and limited as possible, and saying, "Whee! Let's make everything a public endeavor!"

The Freedom-Haters count on you to be intellectually lazy. Don't oblige them.