system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What is the difference between socialism and Communism and why do we Americans fear it so much?
gpt
Both Socialism and Communism at their core advocate one thing and that is the ownership of the means of production by large groups or "the people" instead of individuals. Where they differ is in severity. 

Socialism advocates that profits from a business enterprise be redistributed among all the workers equally. The idea is that all the workers own the enterprise equally because everyone is equal. Taken to a greater level, at the level of the state, socialism advocates that everyone should have access to the basics such as food water and shelter. These should be provided for by large scale industries because they are in fact collective efforts from many different facets of society. Socialism can be applied to varying degrees. For example, many say programs like medicare, medicaid, social security, welfare, and other such safety nets are socialist programs. These programs are ones that apply the socialist concepts of trying to redistribute wealth. Socialism, unlike communism, can be used in conjunction with capitalism to create a society where individuals strive to make their own profits, but will be provided for in the even of the eventual economic downturns caused by capitalism.  

Communism takes it farther and is kind of a theoretical end result of socialism over time. The theory is that over time a socialist society will lead to a state where social classes don't exist. There will be no concept of rich and poor or strong and weak. Every industry and all things produced in the state will be owned equally by everyone and profits from production will be redistributed equally among the populace. How this occurs is a point of contention among many different theorists. Just like democracy isn't the same everywhere, communism differs from country to country. True communism, the kind that the original guy Marx wrote about, requires a huge abundance in resources caused by an increase in the level of technology. He argued that with abundance comes equality. Russian communism called for a strong central government that forced equality to happen. Chinese communism also differed slightly in the sense that they organized people into distinct economic entities where everything produced by that one entity was shared causing equality among those groups, but not equality overall.

The reason why Americans are so scared of it is that it's a remnant from the cold war. Russia and the United States during the period between the 1950s-early 1990s were consistently in a state where war could break out at any point. Instead of all out war which would have been devastating for the rest of the world (nuclear war), Russia and the United States fought proxy wars with each other by trying to coerce other countries into accepting their ideologies. Russia was a communist country and the United States was a capitalist country. Countries that share the same economic/political ideology tended to be allies with one another. In a way, the cold war was about who could amass the most allies against the other. A bunch of propaganda was ran by the United States that depicted communists as evil or trying to end the way of life in the United States, so that has carried over all the way to today.

Americans are scared of socialism because of an entirely different reason. Most people who are scared of it don't actually know what it means. We already have many socialist programs in the United States and they work pretty well. Most people who are scared of it are scared by the word and the fear mongering that happens due to politicians, specifically in the republican party, demonizing the word as a weapon to be used against their opponents. In reality, there are many very successful societies that have incorporated socialist practices to larger degrees than the United States and seen large amounts of growth in the economy and the standard of living. Germany, The UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, and many more are far more socialist than the United States and have greater qualities of life than the U.S.