Comment by TFYS

Those are all results of political corruption, not capitalism. It is the government's job to set the ground rules for the economy.

Capitalism is a good economic engine. Now put that engine in a car without steering wheel nor brakes and feed the engine with the thickest and ever-thickening pipe from the gas tank you can imagine, and you get something like USA.

But most of the world doesn't work like that. Countries like China and Russia have dictators that steer the car. Mexico have gangs and mafia. European countries have parliamentary democracies and "commie journalists" that do their job and reign political and corporate corruption--sometimes over-eagerly--and unions. In many of those places, wealth equals material well-being but not overt political power. In fact, wealth often employs stealth to avoid becoming a target.

USA is not trying to change things because people are numbed down[^1]. Legally speaking, there is nothing preventing that country from having a socialist party win control of the government with popular support and enact sweeping legislation to overcome economic inequality somewhat. Not socialist, but that degree of unthinkable was done by Roosevelt before and with the bare minimum of popular support.

[^1]: And, I'm not saying that's a small problem. It is not, and the capitalism of instant gratification entertainment is entirely responsible for this outcome. But the culprit is not capitalism at large. IMO, the peculiarities of American culture are, to a large extent, a historic accident.

Not century.

Mao and communism brought famine and death to millions.

The move from that to "capitilism with Chinese characteristics" is what has brought about the greatest standard of living increase in human history.

What they're doing now is a mix of socialism, capitilism and CPP dominance. I'm not an American, but I understand FDR wielded socialism too, and that really catapulted the US towards its golden era.

Almost like they made a great leap forward during that century.

Capitalism.

...and they use money so it's capitalism.

There is no system that fulfills your requirements.

It is even easy to explain why: Humans are part of all the moving pieces in such a system and they will always subvert it to their own agenda, no matter what rules you put into place. The more complex your rule set, the easier it is to break.

Look at games, can be a card game, a board game, some computer game. There is a fixed set of rules, and still humans try to cheat. We are not even talking adults here, you see this with kids already. Now with games there is either other players calling that out or you have a computer not allowing to cheat (maybe). Now imagine everyone could call someone else a cheater and stop them from doing something. This in itself is going to be misused. Humans will subvert systems.

So the only working system will be one with a non-human incorruptible game master, so to speak. Not going to happen.

With that out of the way, we certainly can ask the question: What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.

>The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge

And, dare I say, mostly due to capitalism.

In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.