You want to find redeeming qualities in socialism. I rather see socialism as power vacuum for the criminals to capture and no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I agree that a debate on the fundamental value of socialism vs anarchism could easily degenerate into a debate of ideology with both sides taking positions that are difficult to prove or falsify. I cannot resist adding, however, that the socialist position would start with your exact same quote with the mere substitution of the word anarchism for socialism.
The difference is that only about 2.5% of the population is habitually criminal (sociopaths), thus anarchism allows them to do only 2.5% damage because it is akin to having to go personally shoot each person they want to kill, whereas socialism enables them to take 100% control top-down and they can induce the society to kill itself.
Thus for me, I take anarchism.
(I might just convince you, since you are a rational person)
We agree that I am more socialist-leaning and you more anarchist-leaning. I strongly suspect that if we amused ourselves with such a debate it would eventually lead us right back to where we started (Contentionism) so lets set that aside for now and focus areas of disagreement more likely to be fruitful.
We can try, but I am afraid the discussion of the merits of fiat devolves again. My rebuttal is that charities are corrupt too, especially as they grow larger. And a currency needs to be large (widely accepted) otherwise no one will use it. When ever we dangle the cheese of top-down control of resources, the 2.5% come sniffing around. I wrote upthread, that I might agree to localized (small scale) governance (and charity and engineering designs of new altcoins, etc, i.e. highly granular top-down controllers).
This government and bank inflicted fiasco has shown with strong likelihood that Bitcoin is not going to remain a decentralized currency. However that doesn't necessarily imply a lower price. Might grow faster with regulation and centralized control, especially until at least 2015 or so when the bail-ins (confiscations) start and regulation is instead seen more and more as a trap. For the moment, the masses are blissful frogs boiling in the pot.