Yes. Because the government doesn't **** up everything it touches.

I'm all for lateral hierarchal structures and worker-operated collectives, but the nagging question which I can't resolve is how a nation without a government or private industry would achieve large-scale technological projects like internet infrastructure, big data analytical engines which empower the citizenry, complex hospital equipment for health services, etc?

Is that the utopian caveat?

I see that as kind of like using duct tape to hold together leaky pipes. It might work in the beginning, but after a while, the tape will fall off and the pipes are leaking more than ever. Social democracy can't get rid of economic equality. It does nothing to remove social classes and the class struggle that follows. It doesn't stop imperialist war and the environmental mischief caused by multinational corporations. Norway has long been one of the social-democratic poster countries, but over the last fifteen years, our economic inequality has just gotten worse and worse, while private companies gradually dig into our public sector to profit from schools and nursing homes. When the TISA agreement comes into operation, it'll be next to impossible to take back our public services. The age of social democracy has been a fun ride, but it won't last forever. Neoliberalism is on the offensive, and reforms won't make it flinch.

At most the government should be a regulator to make sure monopolies and oligarchies don't form in a free market system; equality opportunity (but not equal outcome) is everything, and we've drifted away from that. Socialism isn't the answer (at least not in a bigger country like the United Sates), because the population isn't racially or culturally similar, and also human nature goes against the very concept of socialism, communism, etc.

How so?

Oh, just echoes of McCarthy.

McCarthy... McCarthy... McCarthy...

Plankton?

Plankton wishes.

I wouldn’t say that socialist principles are against human nature. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just look at the massive wave of socialized tech that has emerged in the last 7 years.

Wired published a feature about it way back in 2009 titled, The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online. It mentions several great examples of what John Barlow called, “dot-communism” where thousands of users join their collaborative efforts for the empowerment of society rather than for profit. But the participatory numbers it cites have grown exponentially in the years since the article was published.

Here are some more recent stats on the state of this global collectivism:

• Creative Commons reached a new record with 1.1 billion licensed works in 2016
  
• The Linux Kernel took an estimated 6,193 years of effort (COCOMO model) starting with its first commit in February 2002 ending with its most recent commit 3 months ago.
  
• 234 million Redditors are living in their parents' basements
  
• LibreOffice has over 100 million users
  
• 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
  
• 10 billion photos on Flickr are contributed and tagged with categories, labels, and keywords
  
• Wikipedia presently features 40 million articles in 293 languages resulting from the collaborative efforts of over 29 million users

The web is the new socialism.