"Make no mistake, as a left-wing radical I support socialism/communism and think it could work just fine. The problem with any of these systems is that you have to put someone in charge, and that's when it all goes to shit."

I noticed that you support communism/socialism, but you also realize that when you put someone in charge, that's when it all goes to shit. It isn't just by accident that this happens. I think if you took the time to comprehend the knowledge problem, that you'd want to find a way to fix that first before advocating socialism or communism on a national scale.

I'll give you one clue, humankind can only get close to tackling it with AI, but even AI is programmed and won't necessarily have the best interest of humanity at heart, because it has no heart. You might be getting your wish fulfilled as we speak, it seems the whole world is going to be forced into some kind of communism/socialism.

Because of this, hundreds of millions more people in the 3rd world are already starving to death because we did some heinous top-down tinkering into a complex and evolved market system.

The meat shortages are coming to a country near you, and it won't be just meat, it will be food in general. This is why I balk at the idea of central planners throwing their monkey wrenches into complex systems that evolved from billions of independent decisions that people have willfully made in pursuit of their various company's best interest.

America has had the privilege of a freer market system for some time now, but there are lots of flaws. A fiat currency, and out of control taxation on the labor of the people, which not only empowers the state to do very terrible things but also empowers tonnes of wasteful corporate welfare towards destructive institutions and systems.

It's not perfect at all, but if you add the knowledge problem to America's already existing problems, well, you'll see. It may already be a foregone conclusion that we're going to be starring down decades of extraordinarily awful government because of this worldwide shutdown. Here are a few videos, if you're interested. I'd watch 'em in order and perhaps they'll change your mind. The first is the most important and illuminating.

I took the freer market and prices for granted, until I learned about the knowledge problem which allowed me to gain some appreciation for something I didn't know was already getting solved by the existing system. Communism and socialism might be nice in theory, but it usually never works out in the Utopian way that it's imagined. Very often the utopia is a dystopia. America isn't perfect and it isn't entirely capitalist, there are some very socialistic elements in it already, but when we start getting into the realm of central economic planning, ohh the things are going to break really fast.