>the ones most countries implement don't work very well

I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.

That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)

Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.

Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.