Huh, you might be right about that. There's also the fact that the word "socialist" is extremely negative in the US (where I live), so it's something that I am leery about explicitly identifying with.

In this case I mean that they might work if implemented - and similar things have worked in the past on small scales - but there may be insurmountable problems in the scaling-up process, not all of them political. (Most of them are, though.)