[throwup238]

You don’t need to jump to political extremes and it doesn’t help when discussing capitalism as the successor to mercantilism rather than its own political system. The answer to the problem of capitalism isn’t necessarily communism or socialism or a wholesale change of political system but lots of small solutions like well regulated markets with strong labor laws and trust busting, a more robust safety net, increased anticorruption and white collar crime enforcement, better consumer protection, and so on. Ones that can be mostly implemented regardless of the political system, given the political will.

[idle_zealot]

We had those tweaks. They got pulled back because they're inconvenient for capital owners. The fundamental problem is one of class divide: if you can draw a line between people helped by a policy and those harmed by it, and and power is concentrated on one of those sides, then they'll get their way eventually. Money is power. Therefore, if there's a policy that people with more money prefer then eventually that policy will be law. No amount of "keeping money out of politics" can get around this. You don't have to call it socialism if you don't want to, but if you want to be able to run a democracy that operates to the benefit of its people then the only way to make that stable is to enact whatever policies you need to ensure that a wealth gap and subsequent class divide doesn't form. A simple way to do that with minimal changes is to enact steep redistributive taxes that effectively cap individual wealth, and therefore individual influence gained through the market. An individual can still have power to change the world, but only through the democratic process. You still have money and a profit motive, but it can't get blown out to extremes. Basically put the economy through a sigmoid function. Market signals still work, but get weaker at high values, resulting in less extreme fluctuations and concentration of wealth.