People, really?
I posted this comment on another post, but I'll explain it again:
Okay, just to clear up all this argument about socialism:
Socialism means worker's control of the means of production. Not government control, worker's control.
Socialism as an ideology developed during the 1800s in opposition to capitalism, which the working people disliked due to its hierarchical nature.
There are two basic types of socialism: State Socialism (Marxism) and Libertarian Socialism (anarchism).
State socialism holds that the state should control the means of production on behalf of the workers. This ideology has been exploited by "socialist states," such as the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which were in fact not socialist at all, since there was no workers' control, as would be expected when everything is controlled by the state.
Libertarian socialism, on the other hand, is opposed to state power, and is really the only kind of socialism that can exist without contradicting itself, as well as being the only kind of libertarianism that can exist, since capitalism is by definition an authoritarian system (the worker/boss relationship). In fact, the word "libertarian" was originally used in nineteenth-century Europe to refer to socialists and anarchists. The best historical example of a libertarian socialist (or anarchist) society would be eastern Spain during the Revolution of the 1930s. (This movement, however, was crushed by both sides of the ensuing Civil War, by both Stalin's Communist armies and Francisco Franco's fascist armies).
It is also a common misconception that socialism means creating an equal distribution of wealth. On the contrary, the main point of socialism is the equal distribution of power within the economic structure of society. However, it is held by most socialists that such an equilibrium would lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth as a natural result of the system.
So yeah. That should just about clear things up.