Capitalism is not one-size-fits-all

"Well, we won't have any problems with the dead ones, sir."
"They'll have relatives. They always do."

The Robocop series of movies lampoons a city that is increasingly run by 'capitalism'. A far-reaching company with a pitiless CEO runs various public utilities and services, including the police department. As a result, poverty and crime reign supreme, and environmentalism has gone right out the window. It's a very funny set of movies. Unfortunately, socialists tend to take these movies as the solid truth and the danger against which they are fighting every time they ensure that the government, "not some corporation", tells you want to do.

Unfortunately, there is one basic thing that socialists seem to not understand about capitalism. Capitalism is an economic theory.

Now that sounds a bit silly, so let me explain further. Of course socialists know that capitalism is an economic theory. However, socialism is not. Or, more properly. socialism is not only an economic theory. Socialism is supposed to provide a framework for economic activity by replacing the market with a redistribution center. It is supposed to abolish property by giving it all to the government. In this way, it is much, much more than an economic theory. The socialist government is supposed to do so much more than to provide a framework within which free people can pursue happiness. Instead, full socialism must provide an economic framework, take personal responsibility for the personal welfare of all citizens, decide the proper lifestyle and employment for all citizens, and the moral framework by which the citizens act properly within the society.

It is important for socialists to understand that capitalism is not meant to fulfill all of these needs for a society. In the United States, for instance, capitalism provided the economic framework, Christianity provided the moral framework, the people took personal responsibility for their welfare, lifestyle, and employment, and a mixture of the people and Christianity provided for those who could not provide for themselves.

I have often heard liberals panic at the thought of not mandating all of these levels of society through the Federal Government, as if there was no other force in existence. They seem to believe that capitalism is meant to serve for everything, and if it doesn't, then capitalists simply believe that these other systems are unimportant.

Consider this for a moment. Suppose you have a guest visiting you, and he walks into the bathroom while you brushing your teeth. "What are you doing?" he gapes. "Moving the brush in those little circles?"
"Well, it works for me," you reply. "That's the best way to brush your teeth."
"Yes," he explains, "but it'll wreck your hair!"
This is how conservatives feel when they try to explain capitalism to liberals. The liberals seem to have no concept that (back to our analogy) you can brush your hair with different strokes than you use on your teeth, much less that you can do a far better job on both if you do not use the same method. Unfortunately, this gap in knowledge simply leads to the two talking past each other: the liberal demands to know how the poor will be cared for (this is usually the part they focus on), while the conservative is mystified as to how they got to be talking about charity instead of economic theory.