Reality disagrees. As I've pointed out many times before on Slashdot, in the last twenty years, two thirds of humanity saw an increase of roughly 30% or more in their income adjusted for inflation. That is a huge change that is unparalleled in human history. And the obvious cause is global trade. Capitalism drives that trade.

We already have that capitalism works better especially in the presence of the "psychopaths". The psychopaths don't "need to go", they need to be regulated and channeled. Capitalism does that.

Why veer into monetary policy? It's just not that important. Whether the money administrators manage the currency well or auger it into the ground, the society still remains and new currencies can be created in order to continue to trade.

Actually, no there isn't a lot of reason. After all, what is the point of arguing the limits of what we know, if we don't have a clue what those limits are aside from some very weak mathematical results?

Moving on, we have three obvious things here. First, that we have a demonstration of intelligence and consciousness. Second, that physical laws apply everywhere on Earth. We have yet to find an exception, be it in some remote place or the human brain. There's no reason to expect intelligence and consciousness to be properties we can't make, given that we already can, just not in a way that would be considered "artificial".

Third, there is a long, long history of people claiming things are impossible merely because they haven't yet been done. It's a terrible argument and it just doesn't work.

You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers

That's how counterexamples to a universal claim work. I cherrypicked a counterexample, thus, the claim is false, end of story. Further, some of these counterexamples are pretty damn broad, like computers or air conditioning.

Which again is patently false. The US has being industrializing for a long time and the power of the worker has increased for most of that time.

That labor is competing with foreign labor that is vastly cheaper. Further, the US have a lot of supposedly pro-labor regulation, policy, and law that has made this particular problem worse. When you interfere with employment and drive up its cost, sabotage new business creation, and just in general, make your society a crappier place to employ people, then it's no surprise that employees have less bargaining power than they used to.

And what does that have to do with markets?

There are two things to note here. First, this demonstrates the absurdity of the original poster's claim that this common human behavior, displayed throughout history, is "abnormal".

Second, markets readily provide that equality, that prosperity, and that benefit.

Which would be a huge waste of that vast wealth. If one looks at people with wealth in that neighborhood, one sees two kinds of people, those who obtained it through mostly beneficial and productive activities and those who obtained it by stealing vast amounts from others. The above robin hood impulse you display helps the latter group thrive. They are smarter about stealing than you are.

Further, it's worth noting that the hundred billionaire, even of the parasitic sort, employs far more than a few thousand people. They are already doing more to help their fellow man than your theft of their wealth would do.

Well, there is this huge gap between a pure free market and stealing 99% of some rich dude's wealth because you think he has too much and wouldn't miss it. I just think that the sweet spot is a hell of a lot closer to a pure free market.

But my point wasn't complete and perfect disengagement from current human society, though that is achievable, but rather that with modest work and good life choices, you can choose what trades you make. There's simply too huge a span between your modest needs and what you can acquire from the world to support the claim that markets "own" or "control" us as the original poster claimed.

Just an observation of normal human behavior. Labeling it abnormal and claiming it's not common is just delusion.

Don't waste my time with this amateur pop psychology. You describe common human behavior. That right there makes it normal. It's only your rhetorical spin (and most certainly not some sort of clinical evaluation) that declares this behavior to be "psychopathy". Your semantics games won't disguise that people will behave like people, no matter how you choose to label the behavior or how deviant and abnormal you choose to think that behavior is.

Only a system which can handle and channel that behavior productively will work. Capitalism is one such system.

It doesn't mean what you claimed.

Black markets don't cease to exist because a few people get caught every now and then. And of course, due to the illegality usually associated with such things, they aren't free markets.

Free markets are only approximate. Nobody ever claims the ideal can be achieved. But they tend to be good at the task of matching people who need stuff with people who supply it. That's it. That's all they are supposed to do.

FIFY. It's worth remembering that all these countries have severely cut back on a lot of their socialist policies. Turns out, for example, that it wasn't a good idea to have a government phone company.

And we need to keep in mind that the fundamental characteristics of these countries is not that they happen to have socialist policies, but rather that they have capitalism, rule of law, and democracy. The combination of those three pretty much guarantees that they'll have comfortable and to some degree, affordable socialist policies.

The difference is that Dr. Gallo both never claimed to have a cure and never had that cure fail repeatedly and spectacularly in the real world. I think the abject failure of Marx's solutions is a strong indication that his analysis is deeply flawed. But you don't need to take my word for it. There's already a quote from the beginning that we can study:

The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences. Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?

Why should we trust this spew of verbiage when the initial assumptions are patently false?

And let us not forget that so many people, the middle class (or "bourgeoisie"), just aren't living with this sort of drudgery. Marx tried to ignore this group and categorize thema as being more or less enemies of the working class ("proletariat").

The problem here is that your so-called "psychopaths" are normal humans exhibiting normal human behavior. That's the thing about capitalism and markets, you don't need to get rid of normal human behavior in order for them to work well.

You don't even know what a market is. It's not some magic controlling beast, it is merely an avenue for trade - trade which you don't have to participate in.

I see you've enjoyed the capitalism too.

Just because it didn't cost you a lot doesn't mean it was cheap. Capitalism paid for that bit of social welfare.

It continues to amuse me how people claim that countries like this aren't socialist hellholes because of the socialism.

And if you assume woo, you can deduce woo. There's little point to arguments we can't say anything concrete about.

Well, first, there is the obvious. Property taxes don't tax economic activity. If I don't own property, I can still generate economic activity, but economic activity that isn't taxed. Conversely, I can own land which is left fallow. The land would have inherent value, despite my lack of use of it, because of potential economic activity and such. So I would pay a tax on something that doesn't actually generate economic activity.

Second, once a government entity collects taxes via one of these particular means (but not the other), they have considerable incentive to introduce policies to increase the revenue from one means while not impairing the other. For example, they can choose to spur economic activity in order to increase taxes from economic activity (such as income taxes).

The actual example of the broken window fallacy is a case of deliberately breaking windows along streets of a city in order to spur economic activity. It doesn't affect someone who either doesn't own a window or doesn't have their windows right next to the street where they can be broken. The very poor and the very rich are unaffected by this particular approach.

Also, if one pursues strategies for increasing property values rather than increasing economic activity, then breaking windows runs counter to the goal.

No. For I'm knowledgeable enough to assess everyone else's competence in this matter.

You are of course speaking of a "soul". And why wouldn't an AI had one too? Humans demonstrate it can be done assuming the thing exists in the first place, of course.

Given that no one currently has that insight - no matter their level of training, and the existence of humans demonstrates that strong AI can exist, then I really don't see the point of your post.