Yeah, Senator Whitehouse actually wrote a book awhile back, Captured, that covers the topic very well. However, that book is also depressing because he illustrates just how fucking rampant it is in the US now.

Evil only needs to succeed every now and then, good needs to constantly win.

I like to think there’s a distinct difference, summed up like so:

Communism attempts to put the control and distribution of resources (capital) on the collective, ie everyone. Since everyone effectively owns it, it feels like nobody does.

Capitalism puts it on individuals. Nowadays, almost all of these individuals acquired their resource(s) by inheritance. If not, by dubious (morally questionable) means.

This is a simplification that may upset people on both sides, but it’s about as clean as I can think to make it.

Note: the following is from the perspective of a somewhat average person living in the US.

My personal thought is that the democratic republic political system would ideally be coupled with the communistic (I’d prefer federated unions, ie federations, but speaking broadly) economic one. They seem to be natural matches.

However, it seems the coupling of said republic with capitalism causes significant and repeated backslides on social issues and education. Capital owners, after all, are most interested in maximizing gains while minimizing losses; this has led to a fairly high number of people being convinced to think that education is bad, especially university level education. Which, in turn, makes them compliant voters and eager workers, often severely underpaid. Which they, of course, have no idea of knowing since they likely have never left their birth town.

That’s not to say that such things won’t happen with communism. They should happen a lot less, but only if we put controls in place to combat abuse and overreach. In other words, regulations. Capitalism…might be beyond hope at this point, given how capital owners have been acting lately.

I don’t know what will actually end up working, but I hope we try something new soon. Because this ain’t it. Preferably before we extinct more species. Hopefully before we extinct ourselves.

I keep ranting, sorry for the wall of text.

It’s because of the concept of successful ambition correlating with the lack of morals or integrity. It just so happens that people ambitious enough to do whatever it takes to rise through the ranks often have to be necessarily immoral to step on people to get to the top.

People who have others’ best interests at heart simply don’t take advantage of the opportunities as often because a number of those opportunities would involve unfairly stepping on someone else.

So to answer your question, yes, ambitious assholes tend to ride faster and further than good people. Kind of like how a large portion of cops tend to be former bullies.

It’s because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.

It doesn’t much matter whether it’s controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn’t even matter that much if they’re smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it’s pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.

https://youtu.be/3eBN_9rMoVI

As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.