Do you support capitalism?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

My thoughts on capitalism don't really lend themselves to certainty; of course, that in itself puts me significantly to the left of almost everyone who lives around me, so I often "feel" opposed to capitalism even though I probably lean support on on absolute scale.

On the one hand, I find the argument that 'capitalism has created all our problems, and if it were abolished they would go away' to be annoyingly selective in its measurements. Yes, capitalism is wasteful, short-sighted, and exploitative; so is every alternative to capitalism that has ever been attempted in the real world. Pre-industrial farming practices were incredibly wasteful and responsible for massive environmental destruction long before industrial capitalism ever existed. There's a reason the early European explorers thought they had discovered Paradise when they arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; despite what some elements of the left (emphasis on "some") would have you believe, the world prior to 1800 was not some wonderful place where people lived in harmony and shared everything in common. It is an established fact that the standard of living for all people has increased in the last 200 years; frequency of child mortality and absolute poverty are at all-time lows, and the average middle-class individual in the West is by the measures that matter better off than a king who lived 500 years ago.

On the other hand, the same obsession with efficiency and short-term gains that made that progress possible is also arguably capitalism's greatest weakness, to the point where we are destroying our environment and sowing the seeds for the very circumstances Marx predicted would cause the fall of capitalist society for the sake of profits now. We are rapidly approaching the advent of self-programming computers, for instance; and when that happens, it's hard to see how the economy that results won't be magnificently unsustainable for the vast majority of humanity. It's not that we can't address these problems, because of course we can, if we want to. But the people with the power to make those decisions are seemingly convinced that this would require accepting losses now in exchange for larger gains in the future (when they will be dead and, ergo, unable to enjoy them). It's not hard to see why VW decided to cheat emissions tests rather than manufacture genuinely efficient cars; the latter might make more sense when you look at the big picture, might even be more profitable in the end, but if their company goes belly-up before they can taste the rewards, none of that's going to help them.

So I don't know. I'm not convinced that the rosy futures imagined by the prophets of socialism/other alternatives to capitalism are actually possible, but sooner or later we are either going to have to embrace some check to human avarice or accept that things are going to get much, much worse.