Apparently there is what we are doing now, and there’s communism? No other possible things we could do. No other changes we could make that could increase the equality of outcomes, because if we even think about that idea we’ve got full blown north korea on our hands.
Nobody is arguing there are no biases or suboptimal behaviours in the global economy, only that so far capitalism is the best system known for optimizing out those suboptimal behaviours. And that in particular, having governments try to short-circuit the process often make things worse rather than better.
"Tax brackets, medicaid, and public schools, to name a few. None of those are communism"
Tax brackets and medicaid are indeed not communism, though in a communist system Medicaid would be the only option. Those are safety nets, not forced equalization of outcomes (state schools aren't really a safety net, and in my view shouldn't exist; governments have a poor track record with education and ensuring everyone has access to it could be done in other ways like voucher schemes).
"A mandate for diversity on corporate boards wouldn't be communism either - it'd be an attempt to undo historical biases that give people unequal opportunities based on their race or gender."
These laws aren't safety nets designed to ensure a minimum quality of life for all. They are communism because they are direct attempts to enforce equality of outcome for only special demographic groups who are favoured by the ideology.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think this law is particularly import, because it’s a top down approach. All that seems to do is elevate the people who are already successful in the existing framework. Women who work like men will get those seats. A bottom-up approach seems more valuable. Mandating equality in schools, hiring, etc.
But we can’t have the discussion of what the best way to undo historical inequality, if we don’t agree that historical inequality happened, that it’s effects are still being felt today, and that the rate at which it’s being equalized is not enough - if the world is biased against you for your entire lifetime then it’s not useful to say “well it improved!”
If life is a board game, you’re arguing for the rules of the game: that these rules are enough to ensure that it’s fair. What I’m saying is that if life is a board game, it’s one where the game doesn’t start from scratch when you’re born - the people who were playing before you arrived have a far bigger influence on how the game unfolds for you than the theoretical fairness of the rules. Which means if you’re born into the right identity, the rules protect you. If you’re born into the wrong identity, the rules keep the game stacked against you.
And if you call that communism, well then I guess I’m a commie, but i really do think communism has a lot more to do with collective ownership of the means of production than mandating equal representation in positions of power
You're wrong for objective reasons. People try to immigrate to the capitalist democracies at very high rates. The same is not true of communist states, which historically had to build actual walls to keep people in.
You can try to blow off actual, concrete performance in metrics everyone agrees on like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality, but you will still be wrong by the mass collective judgement of many billions of people over a period of a century or more. Claiming otherwise is like claiming 2 + 2 = 0. There are no such things as walls around capitalist democracies to stop citizens from fleeing.
What you're missing is that the alternative to capitalism isn't necessarily communism. It can be wrong to argue for capitalism and wrong to argue for communism.
I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality.
And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.
This works well when there are no alternatives. If the best country in the world to do business stops bring the US due to these changes, then capital will gradually move elsewhere and the massive amounts of wealth needed to enable us to even contemplate UBI may no longer exist.
European countries are capitalist democracies though (modulo the EU institutions themselves, which aren't, but let's put that to one side). The differences between Europe and the USA are tiny compared to the differences between capitalism and communism. They aren't profoundly different third ways or anything like that. I live in Europe and the place I live has mandatory health insurance, rule of law, relatively free speech, a strong finance sector, good ease of doing business and high inwards migration. From the perspective of an average person life here isn't much different to life in the USA.
W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants:
USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates.
For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower.
"We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based"
Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.
