[quote=@ACPM]
<Snipped quote by Halo>

I think what you're referring to would be classed as social democracies. Socialism is a system in which the means of production, exchange and distribution are controlled by the workers. Capitalism is a system in which the said means are controlled by an individual. They are qualitatively different, in the same way a square and a triangle are qualitatively different (you cannot have a triangle with some square properties). Social democracy is simply a form of capitalism which prefers to use Keynesian economics rather than perhaps more libertarian economics.  

[/quote]

In theory, though I suppose you could argue that in practice social democracy is socialism since it's as close as we've ever came at this point in our development. For the same reason there has never really been a free market economy (interventionism has always lay at the heart of the system, even in the robber baron days when that interventionism amounted to protective tariffs. Real free market economics is ridiculously unstable and unworkable, anytime we get close to putting it in practice damaging bubbles always arise), we've never really had a worker-controlled economy on a large scale (the "Commmunists" of the twentieth century, the Soviets, China, etc, were 'State Capitalist' in the sense that they have the state act as the ruling aristocracy in place of the bourgeois). So I guess really Sweden is as close as a nation has came to socialism, we might as call them socialist, for the same reason we might as well call Reaganomics "Free market economics" even though in practice it relied heavily on state subsidies for more major technical industries just as much as American economics have since 1941.

It depends on whether you think terms should describe theoretical constructs or practical constructs. There is something Platonic about it i guess; is there such thing as a perfect system and all of that.