It evidently can be addressed here, as you yourself mentioned. No one has yet pointed out to me why my reading is "naive and frankly incorrect," so feel free to be the first.
All well and good but you still haven't addressed my point which is that China's reduction of poverty is due to its central control of wages, construction, and capital.
They had "central control of wages, construction, and capital" to a much higher degree before they started becoming capitalistic in 1976 and the poverty levels were much much worse and not going down. They only started going down once they embraced capitalism and started allowing private companies.
That is consistent with my earlier statement: capitalism creates wealth, but you need another system to distribute it fairly. It's crazy to think that capitalism alone will "raise all boats" when this has been shown to be untrue.
Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen?
Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.
If you keep increasing taxes and reward people that don't work by giving them free and easy wealth, the tax revenue will actually go down at some point instead of going up, leaving less to redistribute. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.