Our system certainly isn’t some sort of perfectly idealized capitalism system that would make a Randian weep with joy. Nation states manipulate currency and laws, corporations use political power to alter the rules, there is wealth redistribution through government action, etc, but on the whole it is mostly capitalistic in nature. The “socialism” in our system is “socialist” in the way Republicans use the word, which is to smear it onto everything that the government has touched (which is stupid). A welfare state and a socialist state are two different things.
Wherever you are, look around at your stuff. Unless you are writing from Cuba, it was all built under a capitalism system. All of the resources around you were allocated through market forces. Sure, government might regulate and try and push and pull it here and there, but the fundamental force at work to pull resources from the ground, build tools, use tools to make more tools, and then use those tools to make stuff which can be used to make more stuff is fundamentally a capitalist system. Even in things that we consider to be “socialist” system these days are really strongly market systems. Medical care in Western nations with socialized medicine is still largely supplied with utterly capitalist corporations operating in a capitalistic system, even if you pay the doctors out of a government budget with wedges set by market demand.
I’m not cheer leading capitalism, and I really don’t want to live in some Randian utopia, but our system is fundamentally a capitalist system, and 99% of the crap in it is made by corporations obeying boringly mundane market rules with a handful of regulations and taxes smeared on the side. We expect our needs to be met by a market operating under supply and demand, and for the most part that is how all of our stuff appears before us.
