True, and so were all the socialist regimes I mentioned. But after tens of years of propaganda by the communists, the name tends to stick. After the fall of communism, it sticks in a bad way: socialism = communism.

I think that the best people to ask are those that lived under "socialist" regimes (I'm one of them). If I ask almost anybody I know that lived under a socialist regime, they'll probably say the same.

Maybe theoretically socialism is a different thing, but practically it really isn't for a lot of people.