It doesn't work for people, because we are individuals, and this has been proven over and over again. Every attempt to make people live under socialism has ended up producing a condition of abject despair and apathy in the general population.
Best Yet. Like the Borg on Star Trek.
As my husband has said, socialism is great .... ON PAPER. It can work for smaller groups, but not for whole societies. Even in smaller groups, someone will eventually buck against it, because we are human and not machines.
It's incorrect to make a blanket assertion like that.
Socialism works just fine in my family and, I suspect, in yours as well. I do not force my kids or my wife to earn their own food and shelter, for example, and I regularly forego things I would like to have or do, in order to pay for things needed by my kids.
And although I cannot speak for your family's condition, mine is not characterized by abject despair or apathy -- except, of course, when certain of us attempt to avoid doing homework or chores.
The point here is that family dynamics are an example demonstrating that socialism on a small scale can be viable and even valuable. While there's no fixed number, I would imagine that the limit of "small scale" is somewhere on the order of 20 people.
The success of a family-type socialist system depends more on interpersonal dynamics than economic theory. It would be characterized by shared goals, emotional ties, and so on.
The problems with socialism begin when you try to apply it to larger groups, containing more individuals than can know all the other individuals in the group, much less forge emotional ties with them. Once you get enough folks, it's easy to begin forming groups that have different goals. And it's likely that groups will form based on ability levels and job types.... This leads to unpleasantness, and the community itself can ultimately only be maintained by force.
Actually it doesn't work morally at least for human clones either. Consider two cab drivers. One works eight hours a day. The other works twelve hours a day. Why should the the second cab driver be required to pay more taxes than the first? (I'm talking dollars here, not some loony left measure of what is equal or more.)
ML/NJ