system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Capitalism is actually an amazing system.

It's a system where extremely ambitious and smart people are given resources, which they can then use to transform society for the better. Often times they're able to use these resources far more efficiently than any of the politicians that run the government.

For example:

The US federal govt spends around 4 trillion dollars per year, and a very large portion of that budget just goes to waste.

BUT people like Musk / Bezos / Jobs / Gates, with a *far* smaller fraction of the budget have managed to spearhead operations that have created self driving cars, Electric vehicles, cheaper retail items and groceries items that can be delivered straight to your house, cloud computing, and super computers that can fit in your pocket with access to all of the accumulated knowledge of humanity.

What's even better is that pretty much anyone with an income can contribute to these projects. For example even if you don't have the education or skill to help build autonomous vehicles, you can invest in companies that do. Not only do you help benefit society, but you're rewarded in turn years down the road when you retire to live off of said investments. Lastly I feel that having an investment portfolio actually makes you more excited to go to work. As you can watch your portfolio grow every paycheck. Under this system, it's totally possible for a person to retire by the time they're in their 40-50s.

Sure, one of the tradeoffs of capitalism is that it produces wealth inequality. But first of all the US government spends 4 trillion dollars *per year.* In comparison it took people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos a lifetime to accumulate \~150 billion dollars. That's a pretty small tradeoff for the societal and environmental benefits they've given... Cloud computing, cheaper and more convenient retail items/groceries, self driving electric cars and so on. An entire neighborhood ordering from Amazon is more environment friendly than each individual person driving a car just to get milk. A company relying on AWS causes a much smaller carbon footprint than a company building their own data center.

Could other forms of government be better? Sure, but the proof is in the pudding. Space travel, computers, AI, smart phones, cloud computing, self driving cars were all produced under a capitalist system. When China adopted capitalism, billions of people were lifted from poverty to middle-class life styles. When humanity eventually colonizes Mars, the technology to do so will have been produced under a capitalist system.
gpt
You kind of dismiss wealth inequality out of hand, but that's one of the biggest criticisms.

Every single innovation you named in your OP are - at *best* - only accessible to invididuals with stable middle-class incomes in the world's wealthier countries.  A poor person in the US, for example, is still in the top 10% wealthiest humans on Earth, but even they see no benefit from Teslas or cloud computing or space tourism.

We have high-tech luxury goods created in an incredibly efficient way, and that's cool sure, but how much of a societal priority should that be when so many live in food deserts, education and home ownership are financially inaccessible to most without massive debt, and people die for inability to afford medicine?