Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

I agree that there is no 100% objective measure; however, that doesn't mean that we cannot look at common factors and get an overall idea.

Something along the lines of the degree to which one's life allows them to: Meet their physical needs Own a house/land Raise a family Have atonomy Satisfy higher needs such as education, creativity, self improvement, etc.

I think your post hides a few ideological conveniences which you've used to bolster your argument, or at least make it suond convincing. For instance,

>total lack of change at a meta-scale like a society only exists in totalitarian societies

Does it? Why?

>in the scenario of a command economy, some of the people involved in the economy would fundamentally need to be oppressed

Why? Where does the oppression come in? If it is being told what to produce then doesn't capitalism do the same, though through a distributed model of command? Isn't it true that under capitalism, one must work by someone else's instructions, by the duration dictated by this other, in the method prescribed by this other, in exchange for compensation often only negotiated by a group of these 'others' (save the power of unions intervening)?

>regardless of any moral or ethical judgements, a totally static economy would be inhibiting of the liberty of any given individual participating in it

According to what definition of liberty? Here's what Marx talked about[0]: communism comes in the form of a stateless society, its conception of liberty is radically different to the English liberal tradition's, which places liberty negatively defined as freedom from interference from others. So it seems like you need to preface "liberty" with "bourgeois liberty", or if you prefer, "classical libertarian definitions of liberty". You cannot take them for given.

>laws and regulations, when done correctly, can increase the number of practical/feasible options available to a populace, even though they technically restrict some of the options that would cause a society to fall apart

Under this schema, a hypothetical restriction on employing labour could do the same - people have more options on how to spend their time and to what end. But it's worth nothing that Marx (or any traditional socialist) never argued for imposing laws and regulations, they spoke about changing society, the whole framework of it. Consider that in Hegel, freedom is defined as the negation of necessity.

[0] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/r.htm

> So under socialism when people work, they work always and only for themselves or as part of a cooperative that they are an equal owner of.

I don't see how this is possible without killing or even reversing progress.

Example: You work alone and make $500k a year. You know that if you had another good developer you could make a million a year. You know a lot of developers who currently make $100k a year. What is a fair pay? You might say $500k, sure, now both of you earn the same. But, then you realize that you can earn $1200k in total with yet another developer, what should you pay that developer then? $200k? Seems unfair, now he earns less than the first developer even though they do exactly the same job. Do you reduce the salary of the first developer to $350k to make it fair for both? I doubt many workers would think that reducing salary just to hire people is a good thing. Also you yourself would still earn $150k more than them, so would you reduce your own salary to $400k to make it fair? Then why would you even do the work to hire these people? Would they be happier to be stuck with $100k a year when you could easily pay them both $150k a year while still keeping significant profit? Would the world be better off with the 3 of you producing $700k total value (your $500k + their $100k each) instead of $1200k that you would produce together at your company?

Ultimately, the only reasonable thing to do is to hire people at what their job is worth for a typical company or slightly above that. Any value above that is not created by the worker but by the work creator. Then they are happy since you pay them more than they got before, you are happy since you earn money for the work of providing valuable jobs. As a bonus you never get into situations where you would like to hire a person, the person would like to work for you but you can't pay him the same as the rest of your workers since those workers are significantly overpaid compared to the rest of the market.

> No individual statute can encompass all possibilities

In the same sense, a benevolent reading of OP's would find that it doesn't implicate all Anti Trust decisions, but just alleges that it's prone to, well, miscarriage of justice, I guess, having left specific examples to be specified by the factfinders, other commentators. I get that leaving arguments open like that is considered bad form.

No need to tell me that Anti Trust is based on prior case law and thus based on Examples. I wouldn't know. I feel that they didn't feel the need to spell those cases out again is a general problem, and I see that as a problem more from a coding persöective. It's horrible spaghetti code and bound to be buggy. As debugging has it, inspections run very slow and for a really good development experience you have to pay suppliers for support and fixes. Vice versa, some vital functionality may be outsourced from the OS to third parties, or restricted by the OS. Complaints against such practice yield the typical recommendation to use free software or implement your own stack, instead.

> if you consider liberty as a social construct

If you consider prosperity as a social construct, you'll find out that many societies have self-reportedly achieved it, even if you would find them oppressive and dirt-poor by your own standards.

BTW moving key notions from the realm of somehow reality-testable to the realm of purely denotational and conventional was the way how the Party in "1984" ruled the minds of people. War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc.