I have been reading the contributions to both of these ideas. I can only add my opinions because obviously both Captism/Free Market and Socialism/Communism both have aspects which are beneficial to society. It seems to me that society has great failures when either of these are taken to extremes.
Pure Capitalism fails because it leads to byzantine corruption and is also self-destructive as it creates economic inequality where the majority lives at the expense of the minority (ie the poor and the rich). This is partly because the Rich are able to own passive income generators that allow them to accumulate wealth without personal effort into it and this benefit is inherited by their children. Secondly as technology advances it will self-destruct as they minimise their human labour with better technology. Capitalism is a system that depends on all of it's members to be engaged in work to support it... so this is eventually the sort of problem that Marx predicts would be defeating for capitalism. This is liberty at the expense of equality.
Pure Communism/socialism fails for a number of reasons which have been well publicised. It tries to create a system where everyone is economically equal and yet as has been outlined time and time again, the only way to ensure that equality is usually by military force.
(In my opinion any system that must enforce its policy through military force is a failure as it has demonstrated it's inability to govern and develop its society. The sort of dissidents you get in that society is merely a symptom of it's ill health, and a military is not a cure for it.... but I digress.)
In communism everyone is forced to be an equal worker and for this reason it is equality at the price of liberty.
The fundamental flaws behind both these extremes is their placement of the human being as a worker. Both of them depend on an economy where the society is made to work towards it. These sort of economies will oppress a society for the many demonstrated reasons that we can witness in both com and cap.
Any economy that treats living human beings as merely cogs in some giant machine can not be surprised when some of them get crushed in the pressure (excuse my metaphorism).
You may agree with me or you may not, either way I would invite you to look at a system I am working on called Humanitarianism which focuses on a system to allow the economy to support the society.
http://www.geniocracy.net if you're interested.
Angelus Michaels
