Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
I like how the most rational distribution of resources is a firm known while a healthy diet is a fuzzy concept to you, Renton. Both are fuzzy concepts, but you never allow yourself to admit the things you don't or can't know when you predict a free market future.

Plus, Capitalism becomes an umbrella for a whole lot of stuff when you say "has already gone a long way to solving starvation". And if you really dug into it, it would be only one factor and likely not the largest.

Bigger factors than capitalism? This guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

I guess the point of my post is that you should treat all of your statements about capitalism like you treat statements about healthy foods.
You're not totally wrong, but I think you're operating on a false equivalency that basic economics is as unsolved a science as nutrition. Nutrition is far more hazy, there are dramatic swings in consensus on the most basic concepts all the time. Most of the boons of capitalism can be boiled down to very simple supply vs demand stuff. These are very well established concepts that most anti-capitalist arguments tend to ignore altogether. One thing I will concede is that while I believe that most, if not all, of the great things about modern society exist thanks to capitalism, I don't presume to state that pure free market capitalism has ever been demonstrated on a large scale. Thriving societies have merely been capitalistic, that is having mostly capitalist aspects with a smattering of collectivist ones.

The other thing I want to touch on is human ingenuity. Your point about the haber process being more important than capitalism is worth discussing. Innovation allows us to dramatically improve our standard of living, and innovation comes from human ingenuity. There are few ways of tapping the ingenuity of millions of people in a society that are as effective as having a free market that allows people to become rich from their ideas. Of course in a pure egalitarian society there would still be extraordinary people who make new contributions to science and technology, but there would be far less incentive for such people to emerge.