To share when someone you love (or a stranger on the internet) says they want to “end capitalism.”
For 50,000 years, humanity hung out in the bottom left corner. Then, the industrial revolution happened. After 200 years of progress, we have never been healthier or wealthier. Capitalism isn’t perfect but it’s what happens when we give people the freedom to do as they like.
Unchecked economic growth tends to concentrate the gains from growth in an ever smaller segment of society. Even if the tide lifts all boats, growth increases inequality. That’s why we are where we are now: wealthier than ever before but more unequal. 
That’s why, in a functioning democracy, we should create policies to share that wealth across society. We should make human capital investments (e.g., universal access to healthcare, education, scientific research) and social investments, as well as enact redistributive policies.
Yes, it’s the right thing to do. But also, we know these investments result in huge gains to growth over time. Redistribution will eventually make the rich richer, too. Which is why if they were voting in their own self-interest, they would also support these policies.
We should also regulate the financial market and pass anti-trust legislation to prevent companies from gaining monopoly power (the private version of authoritarianism).
We have many instruments (we’ve used them before) to make society more equal, to share our gains from growth, that don’t involve what would absolutely be an involuntary (bloody) revolution. Which is dumb thing to even want to do.
The newfound zeal for communism or “revolutionary socialism” genuinely confuses me, not on an ideological basis (I understand the appeal) but on an empirical one. It requires a pessimism about our journey to here that I just do not share.
The big caveat is the planet. The last two hundred years of getting to richer, longer-lived humans have created an environmental catastrophe.
The only way to maintain our gains and population size is a fundamental technology shift in energy. I don’t know that we are going to find the solution, but I do know that best solution will come through a mix of government policy and market experimentation, as it always has.
Authoritarian governments (left or right) are *really bad* at coming up with solutions to big problems.
*Also, I said this somewhere in a sub-thread where someone argued the problem isn’t inequality but poverty. Both are problems. No matter what minimum standard of living we are able to achieve, inequality erodes trust, promotes violence, and destroys democratic institutions.
Put another way, inequality will—if it goes unchecked—be the undoing of our democracy. Why? Because the Uber-wealthy will attempt to use the state to rig the rules in their favor. This is *much* harder to achieve when wealth is more equitably distributed.
Put another way, we should worry a lot about the concentration of power in both the economy and in our politics. The problem, to me, is not an -ism. It’s power. And no matter what -ism we chose people, being who they are, will always try to gain more power.
