From a purely ethical point of view, the endless squabbling between socialists and capitalists is essentially about the difference between misfeasance and nonfeasance.
One of the two great weaknesses of capitalism is that its cornerstone is nonfeasance; the idea that if you are walking along a riverbank and happen to be wearing a $2000.00 suit and come across someone drowning, you are under no obligation to get it wet.
RW libertarians call this 'freedom'.
I'm guessing when Squeers mentions the corpses the US have left behind, he is referring to American imperialism; the fact that the US has been the most belligerent nation on Earth since WW2, and is currently occupying or 'benignly (militarily) aiding' 30 or 40 odd countries, in the name of 'Democracy'.
The number of corpses created through nonfeasance, this freedom to turn one's back, I would suggest, is far higher.
It is hardly a coincidence that poor countries almost invariably turn to socialism.
If your father turns his back on you, would you not turn to your mother?
The other great weakness, of course is the fact that the Holy Grail of mega rich arch capitalists is not more Capitalism. The Holy Grail is to be so successful, one can actually stop being a Capitalist.
While the great strength of capitalism is the spirit of competition, Arch Capitalists focus all their strategies on eliminating competition. They all want to be monopolists.
In short, I am a Capitalist.
Bill Gates is not a Capitalist, he is a Monopolist.
The directors of Bluescope and Rio Tinto are not Capitalists, they are Corporatists.
In this I agree with David f., Socialism may be a good thing; it may even be inevitable. But we can't get there from here.
At the moment, our society is driven and controlled by the over achievers, who are naturally competitive, so capitalism is clearly the most effective system.
The answer for us today is not Socialism; the answer is to remove the 'freedom' of nonfeasance from capitalism.

Actually, I think Aristotle was probably right when he argued that a happy medium was best sought.

Thank you every one for a beautiful dialectic.

After the critics rediscovered their care of humanity, it has been quite interesting and entertaining and also a good example of the dialectic in life.

The first amenable exploration of the dialectic I came across was in a phd presentation, unfortunately it was not available for closer examination at the time, as the author planned a book.

As I understood it, the author plotted the dialectic through the history classical western philosophy and suggested the critical disjunction was the European infatuation with Aristotles Logos and misunderstanding and neglect of his other category of reason the Rhetoros.

With Hegel, my interpretation is that Hegel implicitly tried to appropriate the Rhetoros using the Logos, a confusion of categories (at the level of paradigms or world views), if you like. This where I depart from Hegels work.

As we have seen in this discussion, like instrumental reason (in fascism), rhetoric can also be used unethically.However used respectfully it has inspired an enlightening dialogue (dialectic) and in the good old Australian tradition, an emerging synthesis.

To me this has been lovely little case study of the human spirit in action; and only a fool would deny the power and beauty of the human spirit at its best. Spirituality yes, religion no. IMHO Forget the religions by and large, they have been a tool for the dark side of the ego and have done nothing but dumb down individual existence and sap their agency. The mistake is the attempt to structure and institutionalise forums for spiritual practice and community.

With apologies to the academics for my pragmatic skimming.

Thanks everyone.

Hey Duncan,
if you're referring to me as one of the "critics (who) rediscovered their care of humanity", I don't resile from any of my previous comments.
I still think the examples the author chose were poor; particularly in the realm of biology.

Clownfish
“Actually, I think Aristotle was probably right when he argued that a happy medium was best sought.”

So it is, but on the other hand, “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.

The difference between capitalism and socialism cannot be decided by expedience; it must be decided as a matter of principle. The reason is because decision-making by political process will always be weighted in favour of an expansion of government at every turn, in favour of a presumption of socialist viability that is not reality-based, in favour of special pleading, and patronage, and privileges, and forced redistributions, and regulations, and expansion of bureaucracy.

A state by definition claims a power of ultimate decision-making: all disputes must be brought to the state for arbitration if it so decides. Would we ever think it reasonable to decide disputes by appointing Fred to settle them, including all the disputes to which Fred is a party? We would expect Fred to make decisions partial to his own interests, wouldn’t we? In fact, if he also had a monopoly of force, we should not be surprised if Fred actually starts disputes which he then settles in his own favour,should we? And that is in fact what we see with government all the time (think war on drugs, war on terror, war on carbon…).

Thus, even though Mises showed in 1920 that socialism can’t work even in theory, we have the sorry spectacle of dozens of states endlessly trying to square the circle, at the cost of millions of lives and squillions of treasure wasted.

Trying to settle the question by expedience with the state as arbitrator merely leads to socialism by instalments. This is the current state of politics in the western world: - government grows ever bigger, every time re-assuming all the principles that we already know are false, every time re-trying the foolery that we already know can never work in any historical contingency, every time externalizing the blame for the resulting negative consequences – thus repeating the errors of the socialist states at every stage.

Grim
It is true that all capitalists aspire to be monopolists. What stops it happening is competition from the market. And what enables it to happen is the licence of the arch-monopolist, the state e.g. intellectual property (Gates) and limited liability (Rio Tinto, BHP).

The case of the drowning man is relatively clear and in practice
a) is not really an issue because people tend to help and
b) governmental direction does not and cannot put society in any better position.

There are numerous serious problems with alleging a general need to arbitrarily compel infringements of what would otherwise be the rights of freedom and property on grounds (waters?) of the drowning man:
Firstly, it is a simple non-sequitur to jump from seeing a problem to concluding that government must be the solution.

Secondly, this re-relies on the false Hegelian idea that government is a sort of super-being with super-consciousness, and ethically superior to the individual. This has neither evidence nor reason to support it.

Thirdly, government does not in fact address the drowning man problem. It addresses false analogies of the drowning man problem, where government gets to decide what the analogy is, even if it’s got nothing to do with the original problem, for example being a single mother, or a low-skilled worker, or a poor multinational wanting a handout. This again raises the problem of government’s partiality in its own favour in deciding issues to which it is a party, or which it has provoked.

Fourthly, even though Marx is plainly disproved and undefendable, all his fallacies and errors keep getting an endless re-run, for example, the idea that employment is intrinsically exploitative, or the idea that inequality per se is a ground for government intervention, or the idea that socialism might work eventually if we just keep trying it.

Fifthly, the end result endless government expansion towards full socialism, when no-one has ever refuted the argument proving that it does not and cannot work, and produces consequences far worse than the original problem.

Thus the alleged problem of nonfeasance provides no justification for governmental action.