re: As I get older I start to wonder if Capitalism is really the best approach

For capitalism to work, you have to be willing to let people starve in the streets.

Unfortunately, our government is not willing to do that.

Capitalism has to have people motivated by their own self interests, including the basics of food and shelter.

When people are no longer motivated by those things, the system breaks down.

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For capitalism to work, you have to be willing to let people starve in the streets.

Unfortunately, our government is not willing to do that.

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Um, good?

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Capitalism has to have people motivated by their own self interests, including the basics of food and shelter. When people are no longer motivated by those things

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What if I'm not a selfish a-hole and am motivated by a higher ideal (the Nation,
God, morality) rather than can I make a buck

Conservatives were made to be purely economic in their worldview in the 80's. They've lost society because of it. Empty churches, gays everywhere. You have nothing because you are nothing. You have no sense of nationhood, of belonging to a people stretching back and into the future. No. All you have are platitudes and abstractions as your world crumbles around you.

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So then the question becomes: In the real world, in American society, can it ever be used correctly?

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Wrong question. It does not have to be used 100% correctly to be effective. The question is how much government regulation is required to keep it between the ditches. Too much regulation and you're headed off to socialism. Too little regulation and the abuses could head the other way. Right now we are in the far too many regulations phase.

Con of Capitalism, yes, this shite happens:

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Hey do you like that stand of 200 year old hardwoods? Tough shite we are going to flatten them and build low quality apartments that will turn to trash soon

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Counterpoint: There are zero economic systems that would have stopped this.

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Conservatives have been conditioned to think capitalism must mean "private businesses can do whatever they want in the market"

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well by definition it is.

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you are free do conduct business but not free to harm society.

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the more socialized you government is, the more they want to "control" what is good for the society.

there is a middle ground... when you have no government intervention you create monopolies and the consumer loses. when you have the government intervening in everything you have Communism.

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As I get older I start to wonder if Capitalism is really the best approach

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get lost, commie...

Capitalism is the best system. Inevitably capitalism will be exploited and eventually implode and have to start again from scratch.

The arrogance of anything other than capitalism is staggering. Planned economies always fail because they entrust decision making into the hands of a small number of supposef experts rather than using the vast potential of the distributed intelligence of the entire population making rational or at least semi rainfall decisions about the best way to use their own resources. It doesn't matter how smart your group of decision makers is, it's dwarfed in scope and complexity by the processing power of hundreds of millions of minds working in their own interests. Thomas Sowell has a lot to say in the subject. Our issues are not capitalism based, they are caused by interfering in capitalism functioning. Capitalism in just a couple centuries lifted literally billions of people out of poverty/subsistence living, more than the number of people who had been alive on the planet going back to the dawn of man prior to that point. The idea that after the 20th century anyone is still questioning the superiority of capitalism as a system is mind boggling

Yeah, let's try a big dose of government efficiency with peasants and overlords! It's never worked, always resulted in poverty and misery for the masses, but maybe it will work this time!

Russian workers used to quip, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

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I don’t support Socialism nor Communism. Just taking a step back to evaluate my beliefs.

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Markets and production can be regulated and still be capitalism. The right wing criticism of every regulation or rule for markets as being "socialist" or "communist" is bullshite. Reasonable labor and employment regulations as well as reasonable safety and other product regulations are essential to the health of the society.

As far as the comparison of "capitalism" and everything else, the everything else has its foundation in utopian nonsense. Communism and universal sharing will never work because it's against human nature.