I'm repeatedly assured on this forum that liberals are gun-grabbing communists who want to destroy America via wealth redistribution.
I like capitalism just fine. I simply think it has some similarities to fire, and we have fire safety regs for a reason. Same applies to capitalism. We need some basic guardrails, that's all, and capitalism should be a tool that serves the working class first. Believe me, rich folks will, if anything, get richer if it passes through the little guy's hands first.
Regulated, competitive free markets (of which capitalism is the most obvious and common, but not necessarily only example) seem to be the best system we've got so far for driving innovation and certain kinds of efficiency. But just because it can be an excellent system in terms of
production obviously doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be great in terms of
distribution (in fact the opposite is the case both in theory and practice, with a strong inherent tendency towards upward accumulation of unearned wealth); nor does the magic of free markets warrant the 'logic' that the freer they are the better they'll be; nor does it mean that a market solution is the best answer to every imaginable problem (healthcare, which is often literally a case of 'give us your money or die' is pretty close to the opposite of a
free market, for example, though a mixed public/private system seems reasonable); nor does it mean that more and more production will always be the best thing on a global scale in the long term.
Market fundamentalism - also known as neoliberalism - pretty much ignores all of these sometimes fairly obvious caveats.
Personally I especially worry about the last point, though I'm not completely persuaded even by some critics of capitalism I very much admire. I'm not sure I fully understand but I
think the idea in general outline is that capitalism requires an ongoing cycle of investment to function, investment requires a reasonable expectation of positive returns, which in turn requires that the economy as a whole be generally
growing over the long term rather than receding or even holding steady. But how is it possible or rational to expect ongoing and hence ultimately infinite growth on a finite planet? We can fantasize about expanding our economic activities beyond this planet extensively enough that those limitations no longer apply, but until that becomes a reality - or until we find something better to replace capitalism with - maybe the least we should do is to stop fetishizing mindless consumption, private luxuries and the billionaires whose lifestyles do more to destroy the common wealth of humanity than do a million of the world's poorest. (Ever wondered why 'overpopulation' is such a common buzzword?)
The Problem is Capitalism | George Monbiot
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