There are critiques of capitalism that say the exact same thing.

Personally, I think the key variables that makes a successful economy are actually found outside of the details of its economic system (e.g. rule of law, strong yet uncorrupt institutions, democratic representation, cooperative social mores, etc).

Scandinavia says hi. And those "disastrous" times you're talking about are more the result of dictators, than any economic system used.

No socialist state that called itself a socialist state has been a success. None. Zero. There are democratic countries that may at some point have "social democrats" or even "socialists" in power. These countries may have passed some laws that are "socialist" in spirit, but virtually all of those countries employ a capitalist free enterprise market. Then you have countries like China that call itself communist and still employ capitalism.

Yet, socialist thinkers are pre-occupied with the perceived evils of capitalism (and finding means to abolish it), even though it has outperformed any socialist economic model thus far conceived. Capitalism is blamed for practically every ill, including the failure of socialism itself.

> So, when you criticism socialism, remember that a lot of countries in the world redistribute resources in a not market way very successfully. Call that whatever you want.

Like which? I'm not going to call any form of redistribution "socialism", like some people like to do.

That's just partisan nonsense, platitudes disguised as criticism. You need to do a lot better than that. I could come back with plenty of failure modes for capitalism as well, but I very much doubt you'd call them proof that capitalism is a "proven failure", and I wouldn't make that argument myself. There are many cases where socialism has worked well and continues to work well.

That's what socialism is.

Interesting that all I talked about was a system of exploitation and your mind immediately filled in 'capitalism'.

I think there are many countries that temper capitalism with socialist ideals and people are not worse off than the more unfettered variety practiced in the US.

That's an achievement of a hockey-stick rise in exploitation of fossil fuels and energy use per capita, not some esoterically defined system called capitalism.

Just about the only core tenet of capitalism are strong protections of property rights. All of the negatives typically associated with capitalism are due to failures in regulation (over or under) and the irrationality of human beings and their policies.

The thing that people forget is that democracy is inefficient, but it has less flaws than anything else we have tried in the past. I suspect Capitalism is similarly the least flawed system we've found so far. (don't know enough economic distribution history to be sure).

A lot of people claim socialism is much better, but I am not sure it works well at big scales, looking at say a country like India.

The modern mixed economy, which has displaced the system for which the name “capitalism” was coined during the early to middle 20th century in virtually every place that it existed at the time the term “capitalism” was coined for the dominant economic system of the industrialized portion of the West in the mid-19th century, has, empirically, not been worse than capitalism as far as people’s perceptions.

If you compare only precapitalist systems and Leninism and its derivatives, you’d be right.

> Compare this to socialist economic systems, where opting out is illegal and classifies you as a social parasite.

The modern mixed economy is the closest (though not a very close) thing to a socialist economy system that has been tried on any large scale basis (its even the closest thing – though again not a very close thing – to a Marxist system, despite Leninists trying to claim the name.)

Vanguardist elite authoritarian state capitalist command economies are not socialist, and not (despite the aspirational claims originally made for them) empirically an effective way of bypassing the need Marx identified to go through a period of private capitalist development on the way to a socialist system.

This is really not generally true. I would gladly take socialism in the Czechoslovakia over capitalism in some third world country (say Pinochet's Chile). Capitalism worked very well in the West after the WWII, but that system had strong elements of socialism, too. But it's important to realize that for many third world countries, capitalism was not a success.

On the other hand, what was generally successful was democratic governance (maybe with exception of India and China). This is often conflated with (real world) capitalism (and dictatorship with socialism). But they really are pretty much orthogonal ideological axes.

A net negative compared to what? Feudalism? Stalinism? Capitalism certainly has real problems as seen here, but I haven't seen a real-world system that's proven to work any better; all the alternatives have been much worse. Usually, when people complain about capitalism and how they want something else, they can't seem to define what they really want, or what they want is some fairy-tale system that doesn't actually exist and probably wouldn't work if it were tried in the real world. The alternatives that have been tried have been disastrous.

I think the critique of socialism is that it leads to authoritarianism and rampant corruption because it eliminates economically productive ways to provide for yourself.

The premise itself is screwy because it doesn't account for human nature.

That, sir, is a political platform with some level of appeal.

No, its not. Its a system that evolved organically without any coherent philosophy, was criticized (and, in the process, named) by 19th Century socialists (who did have a coherent philosophy opposed to it), and since has evolved a number of different after-the-fact defenses (which often aren't even defending the same system, despite using the same name for it.)

I’d like to hint at capitalism’s problem with kleptocracy and authoritarianism.

All systems of government have the risk of being corrupted into distortions of their ideals. The problem with democratic capitalism is that it leads to suffering when it’s working as-intended, since no part of capitalism says that people should not suffer. At least democratic socialism is good when it’s working well.

Ironically, you know who else thought the exact same thing, lavishing praise on capitalism? Karl Marx. Maybe educate yourself and open your horizons to something outside your narrow views. I have no problem with people being ignorant (nobody knows everything), but it's grating when somebody is proud of it.

> Anything really is possible when you work for it.

Actually nevermind, such naivete is mind-boggling.

That's what happened with every social system in the past, and, while failures certainly have happened, we've always found ways for that criticism to result in improvements to our societies.

It would be very surprising for the current shape of our society or, more generally, capitalism to be an exception to the rule, unless you subscribe to the "end of history" thesis.

“Late stage capitalism” and “socialism” is a false dilemma. We can see the known, evil effects of late-stage capitalism, and it is appropriate to pin the blame on the systems which encourage this behavior even while acknowledging the benefits of those systems and while holding accountable actors within these systems.