How do I know capitalism is more evil than socialism?

I'll tell you. Capitalism, in its purest form, has no innate mechanism to ensure fairness. Socialism, in its purest form, is about nothing else.

(Don't, by the way, mistake purges and censorship and secret police and revisionist history and all the old trappings of Soviet state communism for integral and inevitable concomitants of socialism. They're not. Capitalism can and will use them just as effectively, even while bidding you exult in how free you are.)

autopope remarked in a comment to a comment that Leninism (which I take to be an extreme form of socialism) and libertarianism (WITTB an extreme form of capitalism) are both founded on a highly idealised view of human beings and how they should interact, and I think that's true. But capitalism doesn't care.

I've heard advocates of capitalism saying that it all evens out, that the free market ensures fair prices for well-made goods and a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and so on. These are, of course, the same people who, when you suffer misfortune, will brace you up by reminding you cheerfully that nobody ever told you life was fair. The free market, in its most basic form, is like a piranha tank--the only way to survive is to be a piranha. It's perfectly fair--for piranhas.

This is not to say that people aren't good, or that it's not possible to be a capitalist and be good. Of course it is, and of course they are, mostly. This is merely to compare the potential for goodness in the system. Capitalism does not of itself reward goodness. Socialism does its best to enforce it.

Neither system is perfect. We don't have that one yet. But of the two, capitalism is the more evil.

This post brought to you by horrible heartburn which has kept me awake for the past few hours.