Socialism is compassionate and wise; capitalism is ruthless and foolish—there can be some truth in this notion, if we choose to regard truth as a matter of majority opinion in all cases where moral, artistic, and political values are being judged, but it is also true that the majority is easily brainwashed, easily misled, and often wrong.
Most people are not critical thinkers; they are incapable of logical thinking; to make sense of the world, they try to reduce everything to a system of simplistic binaries—they accept one pole of the binary as the good and the other pole as the evil. For a socialist, capitalism is evil; for a capitalist, socialism is evil. But this is not how the world works. There exists an infinite number of possibilities between the two poles of socialism and capitalism.
Mankind is incapable of creating a “pure” society—one that is purely socialist or purely capitalist. Every society is a mixed economy, in which there is a continuous contest between the forces of socialism and capitalism. In the Soviet Union, which was a socialist utopia, there were private ventures, and in the USA, which is a capitalist utopia, a massive bureaucracy regulates the private sector and runs the public sector enterprises.
The utopian philosophers and the dogmatic revolutionaries who try to create a purely socialist or purely capitalist society always fail. A society with a mixed economy is the only option. Pure socialism and pure capitalism are abstract ideals which will never be realized. The model of mixed economy is the reality in which we live.
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