[dragonwriter]

> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The system with the strongest capitalist roots (i.e., the dominant system of the industrialized West of the mid-19th century which is the system for which “capitalism” as a term was coined to describe) progressively lost out over the time since that name was coined for it by its socialist critics to a more socialist system, the modern mixed economy, through changes largely driven by socialist critics.

> We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good.

Socialism does not assume this. I would even argue that the idea that “humans are fundamentally good” is even a coherent claim that can be right or wrong requires a concept of a particular kind of external mrorality that is difficult to reconcile with the premises of socialism.

> We need to acknowledge that the core idea of socialism, the common good, is ill-defined.

The core idea of socialism (like that of democracy in the political sphere, because socialism is exactly democracy without an artificial divide between political and economic spheres) is less “the common good” as it is “the common good is ill-defined, while the interests of individuals are known to the individual more than any third party, and fairness requires equal empowerment of individuals to pursue their interests.”