I'm beginning to smell an academic, but I could be wrong. Those of us who know how to work the Net can sound a lot smarter than we really are, and I oughta know. Got any links for all these refs?

I'd have to say you win this round, simply because to parse and dissect this entire thing would take me a full day and a half, and like I say, I don't get paid for this. I tend to bail when it starts looking like real work. So now you all know the secret of defeating me in an argument: bury me in so much bullshit that all you can see is one struggling hand reaching for a keyboard. ;)

A few small comments:

In a parliamentary system, a good chunk of the government can be formally comprised of full-bore Marxists, but unless they have significant influence over the majorities, they are mostly warming chairs. These Marxists are committed to "parliamentary democracy" only because they do not have the power and resources to use their favored technique of rolling over the bloody corpses of their opponents in tanks, and working within the system is their only alternative to being relegated back to university coffeehouses to make their speeches.

When socialists gain enough power, "democracy" gets ditched pretty damn quick.

So obviously France, Italy, and others are not "socialist" in the way that East Germany, North Korea, China, Cuba, and the old Soviet Union were.

What you call "Social Democracies" are pretty much all mixed economies, much as ours is getting to be, slipping constantly back and forth between freedom and totalitarianism. How far in each direction they go pretty much dictates how successful the country is.

Like American politicians have discovered since Roosevelt, European politicians realize that for them (the politicians), the best system is to allow capitalism enough rope to create wealth, and then suck as much of that wealth off for themselves as humanly possible without angering the producers. A delicate balance--how much milk can you get from the cow without killing it? This is not really socialism, but more of a poor man's fascism, if you want precise definitions.

As for Central and Latin America, remember I said that just because a nation has industries, doesn't make it capitalism. A good test: take one of these countries like Honduras, and imagine going down there and trying to start a small banana plantation to compete with Chiquita. If something rather nasty happens to you, it ain't a capitalist country, it's a tyranny run by thugs that just happens to contain industries within its borders. It's also worth noting how many of those industries are not locally owned.