"Best", Tom? C'mon, all one can honestly say is that on balance free-market capitalism is the best system we've come up with so far. Which is to say simply that it's a better system.

Put on your engineer's hat for a moment, Tom, and examine free-market capitialism with a critical eye as the system it is.

The system can't run autonomously. Viewed in terms of process control, the basic proportional loop expressed as supply-and-demand is overlaid with differential spikes of innovation and unforeseen occurrences and mistakes and cheating, while the accumulation of economic power over time applies an integral factor that causes the system to drift off-optimum; we had to dream up antitrust laws to correct that drift.

The FMC is, overall, at best metastable, and always at risk of flipping into pathological metastates. Meltdowns and boiler explosions are possible. We've had to retrofit a ton of explicit dampening feedback mechanisms to keep the system from crashing and burning. It's a classic Rube Goldberg device, Tom!

Further, the automatic add-ons aren't completely sufficient to keep the system functioning smoothly. It turns out to require, at a minimum, a human operator making high-level judgments about the fuel supply: The Fed and its Chairman. The system has a knob on it that can be used to set the level of inflation and growth by regulating the money supply.

There are plenty more examples of kludges and patches that have been applied over the years, but the role of the Fed and the central banking system, antitrust oversight, and fair trade laws are probably the least controversial. The fact that there are fundamental corrective mechanisms like those required to make FMC work should tell any engineer that this is not yet the "best" system. There's overwhelming evidence of room for improvement.

Despite your dark suspicions that I'm shilling for Communism when I suggest that there might be a better way, I'm truly just looking at it like an engineer and coming to the inescapable conclusion that it must be possible to do better. The system as it exists is a grave offense against engineering aesthetics.