I have a few quibbles with this post:

• The Soviet Union was never “pure socialism” nor is what you conflate as “the English speaking world” (not one thing imho) “pure capitalism
• You say the USSR “collapsed” into “authoritarianism, extreme inequality, superstition, cults of personality, tribalism, vendetta, violence, corruption, and kleptocracy. But 1/it already was most of those things, and 2/It had an admittedly remote possibility of transitioning into something else. As I recall, shares in state enterprises were distributed to the entire population, but a population with no experience in neither business nor self-organization; and with the active encouragement of “the English speaking world” (or at least the US) oligarchs-to-be performed a very rapid “roll-up” if the entire economy into a very few nasty hands.

But overall it is incisive and spot on. Especially that “optional” parenthetical paragraph.

“Where there is no incentive to get it right, there is no punishment for getting it wrong — there are in fact rewards for getting it lethally, catastrophically wrong.” gets at the heart of it for me. In the space that I particularly attend to—what some people call environmental but which I think of as the dependent relationship of the human economy on Earth’s living and life support systems—this is a central concern, since what we like to call the “free market” serious distorts (through subsidies and “externalities”) the price signals on which any market must depend. “…no incentive to get it right, there is no punishment for getting it wrong — there are in fact rewards for getting it lethally, catastrophically wrong.”

And speaking of incentives and consequences, it’s notable that not a single person in the US—not one—went to prison for their role in the fraud and manipulation of the financial meltdown. (We take a silent moment here in appreciation of Iceland, which was willing to jail a couple of dozen banksters.)

Finally, since I’m not [yet] a vampire, I’m not yet willing to surrender to this fate. I can do without false debates, but I remain concerned and engaged in the challenge of steering us through these Class V rapids with the least possible damage, and perhaps even something interesting and appealing on the other side.