Comment by throwaway328

> Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections.

Shouldn't we refer to the system by what it leads to in a majority of cases? Like Stafford Beer and the cybernetician's useful heuristic:

POSIWID - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.

I mean, the Nordic model is not predominant by any means, right? So why would we use the term capitalism to refer to that, or think capitalism generally leads to that?

The thing we have in most places certainly seems to be dominated by monopoly players, with laws and regulation tending in most cases to protect that entrenched power and leaving the rest of the people mollycoddled and/or mistreated.

Aside from that, I think your line of reasoning is factually backwards. The rights and protections that people won over the last few hundred years were ripped from the hands of the powerful forces of capital every time, and never given gladly. History shows clearly that these advances were won in spite of capitalism, not because of it - ironically, by the same "left" you seem to be deriding.

This famous "capitalism as least bad system" argument, more broadly, of course, presumes we by definition can't do better in any possible future. This is taken for sophisticated wisdom nowadays, but is arguably just the standard modern cynical excuse not to even begin to think.

"The Dawn of Everything" by Davids Graeber and Wengrow does an amazing job of showing this notion that humans are stuck in their economic systems to be a tired modern fantasy at best, driven by our lack of imagination and political sophistication when compared to our forebears.