Are you looking at the USSR and countries that followed its model?

I don't think you can look at any authoritarian regime and make assumptions about how an economic system performs. The autocratic features tend to cause society to break down.

For an actual anarchist production model, look no further than Open Source. It's built by people who self organize, to solve problems that are real (and often to make silly, inefficient things). It's often (but not always) motivated by something other than profit. It's people who believe in a credo organizing themselves around that credo and building the tools to sustain that credo.

But imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing.

State regulations, to prevent market distortions like monopolies, price fixing, lying about products and selling poisoned food, among other things?

"goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism" are generally built to last.

> something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price

Yeah, exactly, not "squeezing every last bit of value out of a product to appease the shareholders", see "enshittification".

> The device you're currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago?

It is increasingly less and less mine at every iteration. I owned every bit of my dad's 386.

Well it lasted 10 years less for pretty much same thing... Talking about my 27" 1440p monitor. Dell is still working. The 4 year old Asus have most likely some type of power issue and doesn't even want to start.

The device I'm currently using has no headphone jack, no removable battery, no removable memory, no removable storage, a single solitary USB-A port and a locked-down BIOS that only lets you install Windows by default. All in the name of profit.

Yes, the device I'm currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago. Thanks, capitalism.

Now compare clothing. Or Pyrex. Or the chocolate in candy bars.

Regulatory capture (occasionally outright banning a superior product, but usually just raising the cost of competition) as well as anti-competition wrapped up in acquisition culture severely impair this.

That already exists. If it weren’t for punitive tariffs, we’d already be enjoying cheap, high quality Chinese vehicles in the U.S. and Canada, like many other countries do already.

I am sure that your life is better now thanks to the spy device always in your pocket and not because of the advances in medicine, education, human rights...

Industrialization and automation brought down the cost of goods, making them much more accessible to more people.

But they absolutely simultaneously resulted in lower quality goods in many areas.

As an example, people used to buy hand crafted furniture after buying an home, and it lasted them a lifetime because it was made with such high quality material and with such craftsmanship. It was also very expensive, which motivated keeping it for so long and passing it on to future generations.

Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

The same goes for clothing and many other goods.

It’s not that nobody makes any high quality goods anymore, but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives.