I posted this simple challenge on TikTok to see where people's minds were. It was as I suspected. People are uneducated, ideologized and stubborn. 

“What system has done the most environmental harm: Socialism, Communism or Capitalism?”

The following is one of the more detailed responses.

“There has never been a socialist country, but it works well in Mondragon and worker co-ops. “Communist” states have always started as totalitarian and never transitioned to true communism. So, since socialism and communism have never been enacted, obviously capitalism has done the most harm, and the most good, because its competition are systems that.”

Here is my response… Your statement relies on a definitional escape, which deflects from the need for evidence. When a system is defended by saying it has “never been tried,” the claim becomes unfalsifiable. In science, a theory that cannot fail is not a theory. It is a belief. Socialism and communism have been implemented many times as governing frameworks with stated goals, legal structures, and economic controls. When every large-scale attempt produces the same outcomes, the burden shifts to the theory, not the world.

From a scientific standpoint, political economy operates under constraints. Humans respond to incentives, information limits, and power dynamics. Centralized control over production requires centralized authority. Centralized authority concentrates power. Concentrated power predicts coercion. This pattern appears across cultures, continents, and decades. The repetition matters more than the intent—outcomes, not aspirations, are what matter in judging systems.

Your claim that “communist states always start totalitarian and never reach true communism” quietly admits the core problem. If a system requires totalitarian force to exist long enough to reach its final form, that requirement is part of the system. A bridge design that collapses every time it is built does not get credit because the destination was never reached. Political systems are evaluated the same way. The transition phase is not a bug. It is the test.

Worker cooperatives do not rescue the argument. Mondragon Corporation operates inside a market economy with private property, price signals, external competition, bankruptcy risk, and state protection of contracts. It does not abolish markets. It does not eliminate hierarchy. It does not remove capital discipline. Its success depends on capitalism’s legal and financial infrastructure. A firm choosing an internal governance model within capitalism is not evidence that socialism works as a national system. It is evidence that capitalism permits voluntary diversity.

Politically, large-scale socialism fails for structural reasons. Modern economies require rapid information flow. Prices transmit information. Profit and loss signal efficiency. Remove those signals and decision-makers operate blindly. No moral commitment or good intention fixes that problem. This is not ideology. It is systems analysis. Every attempt to replace distributed decision-making with centralized planning collapses under the weight of complexity.

Your claim that capitalism has done “the most harm and the most good” while its competitors were “never enacted” contradicts itself. If capitalism is the only system actually tested at scale across free, mixed, and regulated variants, then it is the only system with measurable outcomes. Measured outcomes include unprecedented reductions in global poverty, longer lifespans, medical innovation, food abundance, and technological progress. Those results occurred where markets expanded, not where they were abolished.

Capitalism is not morally perfect. No human system is. It amplifies both virtue and vice. But unlike socialism, it does not require coercion to function. Participation is voluntary. Exit is possible. Failure is localized rather than systemic. That is why capitalist societies correct themselves while socialist ones harden into repression.

The argument ultimately fails because it treats theory as immune to evidence and outcomes as irrelevant to intent. That move abandons science, logic, and political realism simultaneously. When a system fails everywhere it is tried, under leaders who swear they will do it “correctly,” the rational conclusion is not that it was never real. The rational conclusion is that the design itself is flawed.

Thanks for reading