My swimming trunks has pockets. Does that count as underpants?

I don’t disagree with that. He, like other great minds, had to work with the knowledge and methods available to him in his time. It is our task to stand upon his shoulders and see further, otherwise his efforts would have been wasted.

The way I get downvoted when proposing UBI for free necessities (shelter, basic car, basic food, utilities, healthcare, ect) and using capitalism for luxuries (boats, bigger house, gambling, vacations, ect), it often feels like that neither side of the aisle are happy about conceptualizing a hybrid.

Much like Newton, I feel that Adam Smith’s writings on Capitalism had limits, because there is only so much that he could observe and measure in his time. Ditto for Marx. Both seem valid, but the question is in what way, and how we can use them to put together a theory of economics that is actually helpful.

If I had billionaire money, I would buy EVE Online and spin off a project: a set of isolated but mirrored galaxies (shards), each with an enforced economic system. After two or so years, I would then allow players to leave their home servers and interact with the other galaxies, doing trade, politics, and war with each other. After another two years, tally up the player QOL and count for each of the servers to determine which economy was most successful.

That would let us simulate the economies by themselves, then see how they interact on even footing.

I would argue that the next step forward is to formally design an economic system that uses the principles of both. America’s Constitution was based on the Magna Carta and other concepts, but went a step further and made dedicated rules for how political power interacts. While badly dated now, those rules lasted 250 years for a nation that exploded beyond a mere 13 colonies into a continental superpower.

I think making a clean ruleset that incorporates socialism and capitalism would allow them to excel at the things they do, while keeping their worst aspects at bay.