Or let me put it a different way: do you think the USSR did not have an industrial base?
And who do you think paid for the construction of the municipal sewer systems in American cities? Like in Chicago where the whole city was raised 4 ft to accomplish it[1].
[1] https://gizmodo.com/chicago-was-raised-more-than-4-feet-in-t...
> And who do you think paid
state resources are always a fraction of the gdp trough whatever form of taxation. larger industrial base means proportional less burden on the society. that is why for example urss imploded, taxation was too high and spent too wastefully on military budget to be sustainable long term, while usa could spend that money on the defense budget, infrastructure, et etc, while still being sutainable from the economy, because the industrial base was so much larger.
Therefore we have sewage systems thanks to capitalism as much as we have cold winters thanks to chimneys.
In fact it's one of the most voluntary systems of organization that are known to man (assuming a government that protects individual rights), unlike other systems which are fundamentally based on coercion and/or, as you alluded to, did not lead to much progress in bettering the human condition.
More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
It's not very different from a world where there aren't registered owners, if you think about it.
Even in complete anarchy, in the best case scenario most people would want the world to function in a similar way, using similar mechanisms. Except that people that couldn't defend themselves or have enough social capital would be even less protected.
So perhaps you wouldn't have an official "registry", but everyone would know which parts of the territory "belongs" to whom anyway. In the worst case, it would lead to a lot more territorial conflict.
Or you could have a government enforcing equal amounts of land for every person, but this would be extremely wasteful for many reasons.
Capitalism is what allows you to globally allocate land in the most efficient way that we know of, just like any other limited resource.
> Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the streets and all the money and the other player starts with nothing.
Capitalism allows for social / class mobility without coercion. In fact, it's the only system that directly rewards you with upwards social / class mobility in proportion to how much you are helping other humans.
> It is just more coercion, more of the same.
> More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true doesn't usually make it so.
What are you being coerced into?
Helping other people so that other people also help you getting food cheaply and conveniently so that you don't die, as well as thousands of other goods and services that even the most powerful king of a thousand years ago could not even dream of having?
You don't even have to do that, you could grow your own food and just don't go to the supermarket if you think you are up for it.
Although yes, you would need to get access to some exclusive parcel of land, just like in any alternative system. Most people would not be very happy if you go plant things in their front yard without their permission, no matter which system you live under.
That is the whole game.
If we developed the will to sustainably mitigate its toxic by-products including plastic, that would be another nice black-swan for the future. Though it also won't be singular moment but a systemic change that is hard to notice.
Also, tea making was a huge sanitary step forward.