Political Memes

In a capitalist economy or capitalist-like economy, everyone’s individual self-interest aligns with the collective self-interest a good percentage of the time, so relatively little state intervention is needed to keep it working well

This is only true if you live in a fairy tale.

As soon as greed is introduced, any notion of "collective self-interest" goes out the window (in any system, not just capitalism).

The problem with alternative economic systems is that it is in almost nobody’s interest to work for the common good, either because of a collective action problem (in communist or communist-like systems) or other reasons

Socialism assumes that everybody has a "enough to survive" baseline, but if you want bells and whistles you need to actually work yourself. I feel like that's incentive enough.

Communism would - most probably - face the exact same problems as capitalism, where greed just completely turns the system around and breaks it. But we don't know since nobody has tried it yet.

They have to do so in order to maintain their system when it is in nobody’s interest to do so on their own.

Most Scandinavian countries are very heavy on socialism, and yet that isn't a problem.

the difference between capitalism and communism is that the former works by assuming the worst of everyone and the latter works by assuming the best of everyone

They actually both assume the same - the best - about everyone. The entire premise of "trickle down economy" is based on "when you're rich enough, you will want to help the poorer people out and uplift your community". As we now know - that's not the case (because greed).

Communism does the exact same thing, but flipped on its head - "centrally managed economy will work because people will want to help out other people" forgetting about the greed factor.