What does the relative level of government spending versus taxation have to do with whether businesses will self-regulate? You're just spewing non sequiturs here.

Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.

> Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.

That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.

Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.

But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.

> Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.

.. feudalism?

Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?

The problem with that logic is you're treating economic systems as if they all exist in a vacuum, and you're setting up a circular argument of if its successful its actually because capitalism, if it fails it must have been socialism.

It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare.

Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state.

If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.

What even is "true capitalism"?

End stage True Capitalism™ is when you have to subscribe to a streaming service to watch as the streaming service cartel fixes their prices.

They're not saying it 'mandates' it as law, but that the systematic incentives inevitably lead to corruption. The ability to buy government is irrelevant - this is just the easiest method right now of converting money into power. If there was no government to buy, private business would execute that conversion themselves by ruling over people and enforcing their wishes directly.

Anything that involves humans will have corruption.

Society needs somethings to try to stop corruption wehther government rules or non government actions.

Under pure capitalism what stops this?