What is socialism? And why do people think its bad?

In response to the recent economic meltdown, we’ve been hearing a lot of interesting and novel economic proposals. But all anyone has to do to shoot it down is to say, “But that’s socialism!” and it discredits the proposal and ends any discussion on the matter. I strongly suspect that the people who use this ploy(and the people who fall for it) couldn’t really give you an accurate definition of socialism.

There almost seems to be a kind of “Emperor’s New Clothes” quality to the term. Its as if people pretend to know what socialism means, but instead they are simply responding to a cue which signal them to reject it as something bad. Nobody raises questions whether the being label “socialism” actually is, much less raise the question of what is wrong with socialism that enables you to reject it out of hand, since to do so would expose the fact that you don’t know what socialism actually means.

I suspect that calling someone a socialist is a bit like calling someone a Muslim. It is an attempt to shut off discussion of an idea before it can be considered—prejudicially rejecting ideas that maybe should be considered in a crisis.