I don't agree with their philosophy as I believe it to be unrealistic but their criticisms and descriptions of what the state is and isn't is valid and why some call it socialist may make more sense to you. Hans Herman Hoppe (I am sure someone will quote mine him to smear him after I've mentioned him and haven't read any of this books) even called Democracy a soft form of communism.
I don't know how anyone can make this statement with a straight face. What about ObamaCare?
If it is redistributing wealth, it's socialist. Taking taxpayer money from person A and paying it out as a subsidy (even if laundered through a private company) to benefit person B is socialism.
Anytime you are redistributing wealth under the threat of the government's right to licit first use of force, you're engaging in socialism.
What you're describing is socialism as defined by its libertarian intellectual opponents, and that's a pretty broad definition (any taxation followed by spending is socialism? That's pretty odd... so all military and police forces are socialist?)
So, fine, if that's what you choose to believe, but it's certainly not a policy proposal that is advocated by actual socialists. Even the soft left wing of the Democratic party found/finds the ACA objectionable.
In fact it's explicitly the kind of policy that liberals advocate in order to avoid socialist policy measures and to avoid being called socialists.
That's communism, a specific flavor of socialism.
There are many variations discussed in the article. What you should look for are the market varieties of socialism, especially the ones where the objective is to achieve socialism by following peaceful mechanisms of achieving socialistic goals instead of achieving socialism via revolution.
If you define "left" as anything "not far right" then, yeah, ok, of course it's going to include a bunch of liberals who are not interested in any real structural change in the political-economic system and so are obsessed instead with changing how people speak.
So I just don't use the word anymore if I can. I'm not "left wing", I'm a socialist... Unfortunately "socialist" also seems to mean something weird to many Americans, too. (That anybody could with a straight face call Obama or Biden socialist just boggles my mind...)