We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq and piling up an

We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq and piling up an estimated hundred thousand deaths. Or we could talk about the sweat shop system that abuses workers outside of state in order to produce cheap good. If you think the clothes on your back came clean out of squeaky-good American virtue, you got another thing coming. But we could go a step further than that and point out that the reason they need to go to China to produce their goods is because laws exist in America banning them from doing the same here. Those laws weren't created by a third party. That's the U.S. government intervening and preventing abuse. On the scale of government, that's totalitarian rather than anarchic, and that's what we're really talking about. "Capitalism vs socialism" is debating two middlemen on a larger scale. You need to strike a balance. You can't have a system that doesn't reward hard work, but you also can't have a system that doesn't support people on the bottom. The problem with Paul Graham's thinking is that he cuts out a lot of complexity and focuses on one shallow idea that, taken out of context, is patently absurd. Saying "Socialism doesn't work" says nothing but says it prettily and vapidly. Fact is, we're not a wholly capitalist system. We probably need to be less capitalistic now, because the way the market works at the moment people are getting hurt. It's a straw man argument that socialism leads to Stalin and Mao and Hitler and genocide. Those weren't socialist governments. They were totalitarian governments that went corrupt. But socialism does exist in the larger part of Europe, and in many cases it's led to happy societies that don't have certain of the major issues America's got right now. A lot of them rank higher on the national happiness index than we do, so I guess they're doing something right.