The Democracy of the founding fathers was Greek Democracy, predicated upon a slave society, and restricted to only the elite. This is the society we live in today, even with our reforms towards direct representation. The system is inherently biased towards the election of elites and against the representation of the masses. Hamilton called it “faction” when the working class got together and demanded better conditions, and mechanisms were built in (which still exist to this day) that serve to ensure the continued dominance of the elite over the masses. The suffering of the many is intentional. The opulence of the wealthy is also. This is the intended outcome.
The problem isn't necessarily entirely capitalism, but rather capitalism that is heavily skewed in one direction with regulatory capture, therefore it's no longer true capitalism. Large corporations have the protection of numerous governments to shield them from a truly free market.
In other words, a local farmer selling his reasonably sized crop yields for fair profit is fine. A large multinational food corporation that manipulates food prices for greedily high profit margins--and this same corporation gets laws passed to ensure smaller farmers are kept under thumb--is not.
True large scale socialism is a pipe dream. It mostly works in small groups, but it most certainly does not when that group consists of millions of people. A balanced approach of moderate, well regulated capitalism and social democracy is the best solution, in my opinion.
Edit: The first few sentences appear to have been poorly worded and many are mistaking me for someone advocating for true/unregulated capitalism, but that is not the case. I'm simply remarking that even if our system was meant to be completely capitalist originally (which is still bad), it's not even that anymore. It's a bastardized version of it where corporations no longer have to compete fairly, as they've made themselves keys to the kingdom to ensure no one can potentially challenge them, so to speak.
My last paragraph of my original comment is essentially my point. True socialism isn't possible at scale, but a mixture of it and capitalism is.
Yea yeah no true Scotsman. Where is this “true capitalism” in existence? Or is this another “homo economicus “ that definitively can never exist?
Large scale socialism has worked, multiple times. Do you not think industrializing a peasant society, more than doubling lifespan, cutting working hours in half, I could go on but I’ll leave it there, are things successful countries do? What determines success?
Arguably the most capitalist societies were probably nomadic hunter gatherers where everyone was always on the move, every man and woman was out there for themselves. Not really everyone's cup of tea let alone particularly enjoyable to be fair
Sounds like somebody needs to take an anthropology course or two. You are badly confused. You're not even wrong, you're just light years off base and clearly speculating with a kind of pure almost childlike ignorance of the subject.