However, if history is anything to go by that will stop pretty soon as the hyper upper class solidifies their hold on wealth, appreciating assets, and means of production, and will start to keep larger and larger shares of profit while workers' wages stagnate, and then inflation will start to decrease the purchasing power of those stagnating wages, and the middle class will start to shrink and disappear as it is in America and other "free market" capitalist countries.
It's just human behavior to be selfish.
So I think some kind of sociological argument makes more sense (I don't know what that would be though).
Is it? If you have N participants in a market and a bunch of investment opportunities that are on average net negative, the person with the most money will take the most opportunities resulting in their relative worth increasing the most. The endgame for this is one person with all the money. Works for N=2 and N≃infinity.
It doesn't happen in (some? most?) small communities because of specific things that aren't present in big communities.
Of course, said -isms require either an unbroken chain of morally righteous people with absolute power being in charge of said means of production fairly for the equal enrichment of everyone, or some kind of system of checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing it and preventing corruption from outside the political power structures, the exact formula of which we've yet to figure out.
Personally I'm of the opinion we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and chalk this whole civilization experiment up as a mistake and go back to tribal societies of yestermillennia. Of course, the vast majority of the current human population disagrees with me in that regard and I will admit there are some good things about it, so until that changes I'll be here plugging along like the rest and hoping for better days.
And, of course, capitalism and socialism work best together.
It's impossible to achieve in reality:
- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good
- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products
- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc
Etc.
Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.
