To start, I understand the pain and despair of struggling to put food on the table. When I graduated with a PhD, my first position paid $31k, so to feed a family of four required having many “dinners” made up of those (at that point) $0.20 packets of Ramen noodles with all their MSG “goodness.”
However, when you say “At what point do we finally accept that such a system has proven itself time and time again to be unsustainable, and immoral to the highest degree? Younger generations overall have seen and lived the negative effects of capitalism, arguably in an entirely unique way to other generations before us, given that we have tools available to us that bring answers, data, and statistics to our fingertips. Perhaps we’ll be the generations to decide that it’s time to move on.” I have to respectfully point out that you’ve failed to learn enough about how well (much worse) competing systems have worked throughout history.
It’s like the quote from Winston Churchill: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
Similarly, capitalism is far from perfect, and if left completely unchecked it creates massive societal problems such as extreme income inequality, abuse and exploitation of workers, devastation of our environment, and others.
However, capitalism does have the benefit of being more or less aligned with what motivates humans — wanting to get more for ourselves and our families, and being willing to work for it.
Alternative systems that separate what you get, on the one hand, from how hard you work (beyond a certain safety net), on the other, have always led to reductions in the overall well-being of the economy, society, and the average person.
The solution isn’t to dump capitalism. The solution is to use rules, regulations, and laws to carefully and wisely limit capitalism’s excesses, without killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
This requires civic engagement and political activism, holding our elected officials to account when they fail to legislate appropriate protections and enact appropriate regulations (or remove those that were put in place by more enlightened legislators and officials in the past).
