What systems have we tried, and who and when are you talking about? What are you comparing to? Some of the best examples we have today are the ones that aren’t exactly pure capitalism, like Norway and Finland. If capitalism is so great, why are countries that hold capitalism back and provide more social services raking better than the US on nearly all economic, development, and social measures?

> it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create.

Do you recognize this spin, or is it unintentional? It’s motivating to lose some of the value you create by working to someone else?? Wouldn’t it be a lot more motivating to keep all the value you create? Wouldn’t it be even more motivating to not work, and get to keep some of the value other people create? Yeah, I think it probably is.

> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!

This feels like the McCarthy school of economics. Russia’s problems didn’t stem from lack of proletariat motivation, it came from authoritarian abuses of power. You seem to be forgetting about China entirely.

There were a lot of overlapping factors that killed the Soviet experiment. A major one, and the real root cause of "people started starving," is that Russia is a massive country that is historically vulnerable to famines because food is relatively hard to grow at those latitudes; people had starved under the czars of the past, and the main reason we think starvation will be minimized in the future is a global revolution in how agriculture is done of which Russia was a part, not anything particularly virtuous in the modern Russian practice of capitalism.

Another major factor was a combination of central planning and failure to grasp modern science which resulted in error being expanded. Stalin famously supported a Michurinism view of trait growth through stress over the Darwininan view of natural selection, which led to some bad conclusions when agriculture was centrally-planned under a bad model. While central planning can aggravate error (and there's a reasonable discussion to be had about how tax dollars are allocated), a capitalist society is extremely vulnerable to similar failure modes; while ideally, damage gets contained via the "firebreak" of a few companies failing when their heterodoxy proves wrong (or succeeding and displacing other companies when their heterodoxy proves right), bad memes spread widely still cause damage. Consider the dust bowl, or the housing crash; both happened under capitalist models.

But all of this is a bit of a distraction because the fact the communists spread wealth around doesn't imply spreading wealth is communist. Indeed, the US, while actively engaging in McCarthyist anti-communist suppression of free speech, had a maximum marginal tax rate of 91% and was fifteen years into its own project of guaranteeing a basic income (via social security) for the elderly, because we as a society had grown weary of the elderly dying from poverty when the winds of fortune had blown them to a circumstance where they had no savings and no ability to work. Even capitalist societies agree that taxation and use of taxes for social benefit is a good thing; the only argument to be had is how much, and "taxing the rich is communist" is a doorstop meme that doesn't contribute to that conversation.