The regulations are only necessary while there are rogue actors who are motivated to abuse the environment and others, exploring the limits of the law, following the letter but not the spirit, in order to secure themselves.

These people often grew up in adverse conditions (mentally or physically) and are coping with the resulting mental issues. Elon Musk with his South African upbringing and history of extreme bullying is one example; there are many more less obvious ones.

Once we improve the mental well-being of the population as a whole, there would be no incentive for one to ruin things for others for personal gain, and free market would be able to work as intended.

Even if it's one in ten thousand, the system still needs to be resilient to being exploited to malicious actors. Many cases of mental issues are caused by genetic factors and chance, not environment, to address your argument specifically.

And of course there's plenty of incentive to ruin things for others: having a monopoly on something is the best way to profit, and destroying competition helps a lot.

I'm guessing you're aware of this, but it's not so simple. There's no indication that after a baseline level of prosperity, greed and malice will simply disappear. While I agree that capitalism is the best system altogether which we have seen in action, I don't believe it is the best one.

My hope is that in the long run, technological progress will eliminate scarcicity, and we will see some combination of capitalism and communism to realize utopia.

I am aware it's not so simple, but I strongly believe that fundamentally greed and malice arise from mental issues and insecurities.

There is no incentive for a healthy mind that is calm, confident, and knows that others are the same, to maximise own security at the expense of the society.

I disagree. Greed and malice are just consequences of an unfair society.

The more the people know that rules don't apply to the powerful, then the more the people try to climb the social ladder to become the powerful.

Ideally, on a fair system, you are respected because of your skills or your contributions to society. On an unfair one, you are respected because you have a higher hierarchy than them and nothing more.

My concern with western people criticizing non-western and non-democratic countries is that, aside from some exceptions like South Korea, Costa Rica or Japan, unfair societies that adopted the western-style model of democratic government didn't become more fair in average. On the contrary, western societies got more unfair over time.

Then feel free to disagree.

> then the more the people try to climb the social ladder to become the powerful.

This happens with people who are deeply insecure. They need to climb the ladder to secure themselves. Greed, power greed, malice comes from insecurity.

If you grow up in a world where everyone is respected and everyone feels secure, your parents didn't hurt you, you were not bullied at school, etc., then the only reason for you to strive to secure yourself at the expense of others is if you have grounds to believe others have such issues and will take advantage of you.

> Ideally, on a fair system, you are respected because of your skills or your contributions to society

No. You are respected. Period. Everyone is.

As an aside, capitalism does not make a statement what you should or should not be respected for. We are arguing about something else.

> This happens with people who are deeply insecure. They need to climb the ladder to secure themselves. Greed, power greed, malice comes from insecurity.

> If you grow up in a world where everyone is respected and everyone feels secure, your parents didn't hurt you, you were not bullied at school, etc., then the only reason for you to strive to secure yourself at the expense of others is if you have grounds to believe others have such issues and will take advantage of you.

The world is insecure by itself. Security is ensured through working institutions and organizations. And that, sadly, happens way more rarely than people in developed nations think.

In most countries in the world, the institutions are not strong, and the rule of law is relative. Specially to the rich and powerful.

In a society where institutions can't give you security, where there are no ladders to become respected in a legit and ethical way, then malice will be rampant. Because, in that context, that's the only way.

The world is not insecure by default. I can't even understand the semantics of that statement. We are talking about actors in human society.

Humans are insecure, not the world. Humans are insecure, because humans are hurt. (By other humans, who are trying to secure themselves because they were hurt once, and so on the cycle goes.)

The whole concept of the state (and the government as the current people representing it) is to give people a sense of belonging and heavily influences how society works in their territory.

What you label as unethical, insecure or malicious, may be normal life for a person living in, say, Middle East or Subsaharan Africa.

Not everyone is born into a context where they can thrive by themselves without hurting anyone else.

And we shouldn't assume that everyone has a legit path laid out for them so they can be succesful without being malicious.

In corrupt countries, either you become corrupt or you resign any possibility to achieve anything.

Thanks. You basically are restating my point. The world is full of circumstances in which people hurt other people, in a vicious circle where people grow up with insecurities and try to secure themselves at the expense of others.

In a free market that expresses itself as abusing the law, meaning regulations are necessary.

Subtract our issues that cause us to abuse our fellow humans and our environment, and capitalism is the way to peacefully coexist while keeping making progress.

Free market will work in a post-scarcity society, sure.

> This happens with people who are deeply insecure.

I hugely disagree here. You can feel insecure and try to better yourself. Alternatively, i've seen very secure people (financially at least) being at the apex of self-justifying greed. The number of people who try to buy a conscience or justify "their" spot in this world by whichever myth they suscribe to is way too high. Way too high.

You are looking at the topmost layer and missing most of my point. Extreme financial security, especially self-made, is often compensating for insecurity.

> As an aside, capitalism does not make a statement what you should or should not be respected for. We are arguing about something else.

Yeah, but some people think that socialist countries are unfair only because they are socialist. They believe that turning those countries into liberal democracies will make those countries more fair.

And Russia is the perfect example of why that doesn't happen.

I believe there is no example of a socialist country that is not also a de-facto dictatorship, and I believe if there is a rule by a minority with no democratic election process then it is indeed unfair.

The nordic countries are though? I'd say i would consider any country were the state expenditure account for more than 50% of GDP socialist. And any company where the workers own more than 50% of the share communist (those exist). Unless we have different definition?

Edit: I'm not opposing socialism to capitalism though. For me capitalism is that the capital own the means of production, aka: more than 50% of the shares belong to investors, not workers.

Yes, we have different definitions. I meant capitalism in the most layperson's definition: a system where you sell something and I buy something from you, then you take that money and go to the milkman and buy yourself cheese. As opposed to a system where people work for some fixed minority, and then that fixed minority distributes the outcome across everybody. (Of course, keeping the bigger chunk to itself.)

Of course. Thing is, considering all socialist countries that transitioned to democracy, how many of them became fairer and with less corruption?

idk… the entirety of ex-USSR except one or two countries?

Interesting. I hope you are right. I'm afraid I am a bit more cynical.

Absolutely. "best so far" != "best there can ever be". Western liberal capitalism is heavily flawed, it's just marginally better than the alternatives currently in existance and therefore the best starting point to build an even better one.

Applying abstract thinking from first principles, what kind of approach could theoretically be better?