You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. Where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky... they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out.
- George Carlin
Whilst wearing spectacles.
"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."
Fernald Widdershins
Paraphrase of a quote remembered late at night.
While capitalism does involve unequal sharing of blessings, a great deal of the time those blessings come with a clear and tremendous cost to others (factory workers in Mexico, for example). I would consider *this* to be the inherent vice of capitalism— not that some people get to have more than others, but that many of the blessings themselves are born from human suffering.
Meanwhile with socialism, the "virtue" itself seems untruthful, in that some of the time misery wasn't truly shared. While socialist theory proclaims to support equality, it has in practice always treated different groups of people and/or individuals themselves vastly differently from each other, at no fault of those affected. When it came to Mao's culture war and Castro's reeducation camps, some people were given a lot more misery than others under the regime, for their age or sexuality or education or what have you..