But ultimately, socialism has not succeeded in supplanting capitalism, as its proponents had hoped. In the United States, at least, socialism has become something of a dirty word. So industrial capitalism certainly seems to have won out, and in terms of material well-being and access to goods and services for people around the world, that's probably a good thing. Ugh, you keep falling over! You're a great bit, but a very flimsy one. Actually, come to think of it, you're more of an 8-bit. But how and to what extent we use socialist principles to regulate free markets remains an open question, and one that is answered very differently in, say, Sweden than in the United States.