Measures of human flourishing are rising for the mid-stagers and so globally it might look ok. In late stage countries human flourishing has begun a decline.

While the last 20 years we have made progress on a some acute problems like heart disease, complex ill-health is very much on the rise - Cancer, nearly all mental health issues, obesity & diabetes, suicide. Poverty is on the rise, literacy rates are down.

Human flourishing is just keeping its head above water in these places. Humans are resilient, but there are limits.

Capitalist-fundamentalists will also throw up their hands when asked how we might solve existential problems for which the is no end in sight - eg global warming, the toxifying of our food systems with plastics and industrial chemicals, government debt, etc.

> Capitalism is a system built by people that recognize that humans are reliably selfish and seeks to align their selfish interests as best as it can with the rest of the populous.

You just described mass institutional psychopathy.

I don't consider my family to be innately selfish within the family dynamic, or my friends to be innately greedy.

If you build a system that rewards greed and selfishness (and punishes giving), people will be greedy and selfish within that system. Don't reverse the cause and effect.

That's simply not true. Democratic Socialism/Social Democracy has been very successful.

It's also quite possible that humanity can eventually find a new system that works better than capitalism. After all it took thousands of years for humanity to find capitalism.

The countries you are likely thinking if who say they are those things are still capitalist countries with a touch more of social welfare than other similar countries.

There are other countries who claim to be socialist but are just totalitarian dictatorships (not surprising, in order to control the economy, you have to control the people), are lying or both.

That's just semantics. Whether we want to call them left wing forms of capitalism or moderate forms of socialism isn't really important. What's important is that there ARE nations with successful economic systems that are better than what people call "late stage capitalism".

These successful economic systems are still based on private ownership rights and the right to assemble (in this context the right to form business partnerships with low exit costs). In other words: the core capitalist building blocks.

Like I said, what you call them isn't the point. The point is that there are better options than what we currently have.

That's like saying anything with four tires and a motor is a sedan. Name economic systems (including socialism) have the right to create businesses and own property. Capitalism is ownership of private ventures by an investment class who reap the profits (paying the employees as little as possible); socialism is when companies are owned collectively (most may be owned by employees, some may be owned nationally). Everything else is unrelated.

And now the pitch.

The welfare states of Western Europe and the Nordic countries seem much better than America's system of late stage capitalism and they have not lead to mass starvation or total collapse.

Likewise, America's economy seemed to be much more healthy when it had a more active/successful labor movement.

Those welfare states only exist as such because the US subsidizes their drug discovery, R&D, defense, spooks, and related.

Without the US taking one for the team, Europe could not maintain its social democracies or its welfare states.

Then I think that the US should stop taking one for the team and we can work from there.

I'm not sure if the current success of Norway can be replicated everywhere. It has a small population living off a state oil fund that has something like $300k/person.