At the risk of committing a kind of "No True Scotsman" fallacy, I'm curious what exactly the issue with capitalism is.

As I understand it, capitalism is very straightforward. You and I have stores. Your product is better, more people patronize you, you make more money than I do.

Either I improve my product to up my own sales, or I eventually have to pack it up and try something else.

That's it, in a nutshell. Can a loss be devastating? Yes. Can the competition be vicious? Absolutely. But at what point is it immoral or evil? I'm not sure.

It seems to me that the immorality lies in the periphery: Companies sabotaging each other rather than competing; paying lobbyists to lift regulations and lower taxes; outsourcing production to sweat shop labor overseas. Basically the issue isn't the system, but the gaming of it.

There is also the "no safety net" issue. Competition incentivizes creativity and innovation, and we all benefit from that. But the idea that if my business fails I might become destitute means I'm going to be more risk-averse, de-incentivizing creativity and innovation.

This dynamic minimizes not only the number of people who prosper through the pursuit of creative and innovative ideas, but also the number of ideas that get introduced. We all lose there, and our incentives should be to maximize participation for all by guaranteeing a safety net.

There's also a problem when we try to apply capitalism to areas where there are clear conflicts of interest. Having a for-profit model in healthcare creates a ton of obvious problems that undercut the fundamental aims of medicine. We shouldn't have capitalism working there.

To me, none of those issues look like problems with "capitalism" per se, however. They seem like either misapplications of the system or a limitation of our capacity to think beyond it. Capitalism can't solve every issue or function in every circumstance, and it doesn't need to.

We need to recognize where capitalism benefits us, and where it doesn't. We generally agree that having a public education system makes sense, because a for-profit model excludes people and causes overall productivity to decline. We should think of other areas the same way.

But it doesn't seem to me to make sense to blame capitalism for its misapplications, or to suggest that people would behave differently under a different system. You'll always have greedy assholes trying to get one over; they'll just be gaming a different system.

And this is not to mention all the benefits this system has reaped. The very technology I'm using to communicate this to you is a direct result of capitalism. Is it perfect? No, but to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst form of economics, except for all the others.