[haberman]

I don't think that analogy works: many people never get cancer which means we have a clear model for what a healthy, cancer-free life form looks like. "Curing cancer" just means returning a body to this healthy, pre-cancerous state.

But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.

This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.

[ardy42]

> But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.

That's not quite accurate, since capitalism hasn't always existed and markets haven't haven't always been the primary means of exchange. There's also a fairly broad range of capitalist systems with different trade offs. We also don't know if capitalism won't also ultimately lead to totalitarian results.

In these discussions, we also probably need to make a distinction between capitalism and markets. You could perhaps have a society that keeps markets more-or-less as they are but "removes capitalism" by implementing a different relationship between labor and ownership, for instance.

> This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.

I dispute the latter point. It's kinda like saying the failure of the iAPX 432 and Itanium strongly suggests there's no better alternative to the x86 architecture. In this case, I don't think we have much understanding about what's unknown.