I think that socialism gets a bad rap because of people who have twisted it to meet their needs.  People can accuse others of being a socialist, especially during an election, just because they don't like the policies.  Yet America has had social safety nets since the New Deal.

Those are very interesting comments. I'd take issue with two things both of you said though. You said most economic systems are a continuum. But I think there are other kinds of socialism that do not have the means of production under government control. I'm thinking something like the socialist anarchists.  Systems like the Russian did not distribute the means of production equally in any way. I know you're not talking about Russia specifically, but I would disagree with the continuum because I disagree with government control.

The other point is that socialism has no work incentive. I don't see how this follows from an equal distribution of the means of production. You can imagine a society where the means are distributed equally but where people still have to work to get an education, enter an occupation of some kind, or hold a public position.

Lastly, I'm not sure that human nature doesn't allow for an equal distribution of anything. The truth is that we're very ethnocentric in our understandings of societies, and there may in fact be societies out there that do allow equality. But even if there have been none to date, that's not to say that human nature is against it, for equality is a king of cooperation, and we do know that cooperation is a very strong part of human natu

Historically, most socialist anarchists have not argued for an absence of government per se. They argue (or have historically argued) for the destruction of the modern nation-state, to be replaced with more local communal (and directly democratic) systems of government through which production would be communally organized.

I think you're right about the work incentive, which is a truism stated without evidence, but then again so is the idea that "equality is a king of cooperation." Setting aside my continuum and accepting a sort of "all or nothing" definition, I still suspect (and there's a bit of historical evidence, not to mention Marxian and anarchist theory, to support this) that some sort of coercive power would be required to achieve socialism as a system. 

That is a perfectly serviceable definition of socialism, and I agree that this is a highly theoretical construct, if only because human beings, by our very nature,  cannot seem to tolerate an equal distribution of anything.  There may be societies somewhere where this idyllic system can succeed, but I have seen no evidence of it.  The other difficulty with socialism is that it assumes people will work with no incentive, which also seems counter to our natural inclinations.

"Socialism" is a term laden with a great deal of ideological baggage in the United States. It has had long-standing (as in before the Cold War) associations with a sort of vaguely defined European radicalism. For this reason, it has been deployed by some in a debate, one that has raged since the founding of the nation in one form or another, about the proper role of government. Your definition of socialism is the orthodox one, and I agree with it in the abstract. In reality, though, most economic systems can be thought of as being on a continuum, with no government control of the means of production on one end and total government control on the other. No system that I know of is on either end. All of them are somewhere in between, and it's obviously difficult to say at what point, exactly, an system qualifies as "socialist." What I'm trying to say is that socialism to me is a principle more than a system as such.