Socialism is a set of ideologies promoting an economic system in which all or most productive resources are the property of the government, in which the production and distribution of goods and services are administered primarily by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which any remaining private production and distribution is heavily regulated by the government rather than by market processes. Central to the meaning of socialism is common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire global population.
In practice, socialist economic principles are applied under varying attitudes toward personal freedom, civil liberties, mass political participation, bureaucracy and political competition. Socialism encompasses Western European democratic socialism to the more authoritarian socialisms of many third world regimes to the totalitarian excesses of Soviet-style socialism or communism.
