If that's your analogy, then capitalism is about making a few people happy at the expense of everyone else.

We collectively are not done, yet. We can still make it better for everyone. Let's at least _try_ new ideas.

As someone from a third world country where people live in poverty, my view is that new ideas are bad and dangerous. There is a blueprint for poor countries to become wealthy ones: free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy. It’s how the countries that are currently rich became rich. It worked in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Its working in myriad other countries. While academics fuck around with “new ideas” progress is deferred and people suffer in poverty.

A lot of really bad ideas have been tried and failed to work in this world and we should learn from them - that said I don't know if America's version of a liberal democracy has proven itself to be that great in the long run. There was a period of extreme common wealth growth but after WW2 (about the eighties) that's mostly dried up. While we need to recognize failures abroad (i.e. the Soviet system implemented by Lenin and its offshoots) I think our own system needs some active maintenance to be rebalanced. Lately the extremes have grown too wide and we need to do like Teddy and break up some of the big concentrations of wealth so that the engine can keep running clean for another half-century or so.

It's misleading to think of any democratic style government as being in stasis - the world is constantly in flux.

You're disregarding the negative examples. Free markets have been tried and failed in Argentina, Russia, and to various degrees everywhere in most former 'communist' countries - they quickly turned into cleptocracy and corruption. China showed that you can get very wealthy without rule of law and without liberal democracy, and with massive government intervention in the market (but not with a planned economy).

In my own country, free markets only started bringing prosperity after getting at least some semblance of liberal democracy and rule of law - before that, in the absence of a strong state, it was a very literal robber barons' paradise.

I think this is why Rayiner said the blueprint was "free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy", not "free markets" by themselves.

Rayiner's own positive examples did not fulfill that blueprint, either, with the exception, I think, of Japan.