There's some truth to this in that all organizations ultimately have their own perpetuation as a goal...but this is also a little like saying "well, there are a lot of complicated macroeconomic drivers of theft" while you're stealing somebody's purse.

The harms here are not the result of some broad faceless force so distributed and ethereal as to avoid accountability. The people performing them know exactly what they are doing. They're choosing to do it, when no systemic factor forces them to. If they wanted to not harm people, they could do so at zero or even negative harm to themselves.

Systems-level thinking is a useful tool, but it can make you miss the trees for the forest when a single concrete human being in front of you is just a bad person.

Sometimes it looks as if it matters more whether people are good and work in good faith rather than what a particular system is.

However, the more extreme the system (be it anarchocapitalism or communism), the higher the requirement to the goodness of people.

As is, in current societes I find that the ambient chaos of general democratic capitalism counteracts the threat of small minority making wrong decisions (Mao’s famine, etc.) while strategic regulations help curb bad actors abusing the system (like selling people poison or dumping toxic waste into rivers).

Both are needed, and I usually suspect that people who call for one extreme or the other either have an agenda or have not thought it through. (In the West it is often pro-capitalist tendencies, though I encountered both.)

> democratic capitalism

I don't think I have anything in response to that one.

I was actually on your side in this, oh well!

Only liberals could describe our system as "democratic capitalism" with a straight face, its absurd. I'm on the left, I'm not a liberal, so no, we are definitely not on the same side. I believe our intolerable levels of inequality and disparity is caused by systemic issues not some "bad actors".

OK.