I think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.

(Many) people love gambling. Capitalism is great at giving people what they want.

Look around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy.

The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction.

This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.

Once the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.

"Above average" is underselling it: the US has by far the the highest incarceration rates of the rich world [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

The concept of private prisons basically proves why people who don't understand capitalism shouldn't engage in it.

The entire advantage of capitalism over socialism is that customer choice forces you to make better products, and everything else stems from that. If you only have one grocery store, one school system, one health insurer, one employer in town, it doesn't matter how bad they get, you'll be their slave forever. This is particularly true if the person making the decisions at those institutions doesn't profit from them doing well.

In a private prison system, there's no choice, you can't just switch prisons if you don't like the one you're in. This is the worst system of all, as there's still the profit incentive, without competition keeping it in check.

I think you could do a private prison system well. Maybe let the prisoners choose their prison, with major disincentives for prison owners if prisoners escape. Maybe pay them for every day their newly-released inmates stay out of jail, encouraging rehab programs that actually work. Those would align what's good for the owner with what's good for society, which is all that capitalism is ultimately all about.

Capitalist countries don't have famines at home. That's different from "capitalism prevents famines". Capitalism is happy to cause hunger, inflict death, or imprison people if it's profitable for capitalists, that's baked into the structure of the structure of the system. There's no systemic feature of capitalism that directs capital generating activity unless it violates natural and human rights.

Give it a bit!

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/g-s1-115240/iran-war-strait-h...

(I'm being snarky here, but COVID definitely exposed some supply chain vulnerabilities.)

Lots of African countries have market economies and also poverty and hunger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Niger springs to mind, massively capitalist with a lot of oil and mining