“No; any governmental ‘safety net’ is socialism/communism.”
Sorry. You are just plain wrong about this. And your response is a typical knee-jerk reaction based on ideological dogma rather than critical analysis.
Law enforcement is a safety net. Emergency services is a safety net. Disaster relief is a safety net. Do you think conservatism is just economic survival of the fittest when dealing with disease, draught, widespread crop failures? How about other major natural disasters? How about war?
The key is to go to the underlying principle of ownership and treat the rich and poor equally rather than with favoritism.
“Start making the people comfortable in poverty and society breaks down.”
As I said, you have to avoid incentivizing things like this.
The very existence of currency involves government. The conservative utopia you imagine does not exist any more than the communist or socialist ones. Conservatism is about limited (not non-existent) government and personal responsibility (not pie in the sky self-actualization).
When people or companies innovate, our government rewards this with a limited monopoly (which unfortunately has been parlayed into eternal monopolies) for the benefit of everyone. This requires the forfeiting of certain natural rights of free citizens. These rights have value. Benefits given in exchange for these rights is both reasonable and consistent with conservatism. And that does not remotely resemble socialism or communism, especially when you remove means testing and replace it with the one simple test of whether someone is a citizen.
No; history proves me “plain right”. FDR’s creeping socialism starting with so-called “social security”, then Johnson’s Medicare (and worse, including the 1965 amendments to SS that essentially created Medicaid) have created cultures of dependency and entitlement, and not a thing about them even required before their institution; they are not even “safety nets” but Ponzi schemes. All designed as attacks on the family, and also on the economy; not to mention to increase the power of the federal government.
As for money, take note that its coining was a power solely given to Congress, and there was no impetus to imitate the British Empire by creating a central bank. And to be utterly frank, governments are not needed to create money and/or its value: take note of Bitcoin.