> This is also bordering on giving capitalism credit for the rule of law.
I'd rather go the other way, and give rule of law credit for capitalism. Probably one of its better effects. Capitalism requires an external neutral enforcer (for varying degrees of neutrality, but generally more neutral is better) to enforce property rights. Otherwise you end up with capital owners that need their own security forces, which morph into de facto states (see medieval feudal lords for an example). This state control of the means of production may work well on a 5-10 year period occasionally, but it's disastrous in the long term.
> considering China as capitalist would seem to make for more productive analysis
I think you can look at them in that lens post Deng or so (and they've had significantly fewer famines since then). Although with the recent consolidation of power, I'm not sure if the lens of totalitarianism might yield a better light. The union of political, military, and economic power completely within a single institution has certain properties that don't hold true for any single one of those.
> ...rather due to specific forms of corruption that seem like "private" ownership run amok and are thus reasonable to pin on capitalism itself.
Might I ask you to elaborate on this? Because the failures I see in China tend to pattern match more towards the patronage networks you see crop up in public systems. But I'll admit to not having a perfect understanding of China, and am willing to hear a case be made.
> I already mentioned imaginary property, which is a form of ownership/capital invented out of whole cloth, under the idea that its better to have more forms of ownership rather than unowned commons.
I'll give you this one. Intellectual property is dumb, as there's no scarcity requiring an efficient distribution of goods. You can argue private ownership of (non-intellectual) property is an evil, but I would argue that it is a necessary one (on the level of taxation). And one we get quite a bit of benefit from.
> There are also our overfinancialized money markets, which have paperclip maximized their way to creating financial assets from of any future rent stream they can. This is backed up by governmental help from the federal reserve supplying an endless stream of money for creating said financial instruments, such that the first-order asset ownership of most of society hardly matters in the larger economic picture.
So, I mean... let them fail. They've been trying to fail since the 80s or so with the bond crisis back then, and we keep propping them up. I'm gonna be honest, blaming capitalism for the actions of politicians feels like an unfair slight. Propping up ventures well past their point of usefulness because of political necessity is one of the hallmarks of a politically owned system, not a privately owned one. One that has happened over and over (see the soviet army's capture of the USSR's budget, or Lysenkoism).
You could say that the capitalists pressure the politicians, which is fair on some level, but seems like a symptom of a political system corruption. I would argue that as long as you have that, none of your economic systems are going to do what you want, though I will still argue that being as capitalistic as possible will, generally, still perform the best.
> But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that mass accumulations of capital will inevitably change the rules of the game to benefit themselves
This is probably the best argument here. Nobody, least of all me, argues that capitalists are supremely ethical. In fact amorality is generally one of the big points of it. There does need to be some sort of external arbiter.
I guess, the general avenue of my counter-argument is that it works well. Sure, it has downsides, but we have billions of lives riding on this. Show me a system that has a decently scaled example of working better.
> why should we put the philosophical focus on capital
Because capital + labor is how you make stuff, and we need a bunch of stuff made. And since the industrial revolution the majority of the advancement has been from the refining of capital rather than throwing more labor at the issue.