It may be possible that socialism and capitalism are just economic tools that can applied to different sectors of the economy depending on which works best in a given context.

But sure, let’s all form up into groups that either think only socialism works or only capitalism works and try to misapply these to sectors of the economy where they’ve already been proven not to work. That makes sense!

It’s like one group deciding that hammers are better than screwdrivers and trying to beat a screw into something with a hammer. Then the other group decides screwdrivers are better than hammers and are trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in nails. They’ll both kinda work for everything, but for anyone that’s not caught up in the argument it all seems kind of silly. Why not just use the screwdriver for the screws and use the hammer for the nails?

Or right, because of ideology.

I’ll take that one step farther - socialism and capitalism are not even concrete tools - they are abstract values that actual tools and policies can be measured against - “this policy is more capitalist because it satisfies capitalist values X and Y, but it’s also a bit socialistic because it contributes to socialist value Z”. This is true for many things - like progressivism vs conservatism or deontology vs utilitarianism, to name a few - instead of treating them as the directions on the axes people decided to make them their all ideology.

Imagine if this was done with temperature. Alice likes hot weather and Bob likes it cold, so they decide to join the “Hotist” and “Coldist” camps respectively and fight each other publicly over which side of Mercury the Earth should be terraformed to. All this while the actually difference in their preferences is just a few degrees.

I don’t advocate for centrism because I don’t think we should always strive for the exact middle of every topic. We should strive for some point in the spectrum, because the very extremes are seldom correct (usually because of diminishing returns which make it, at the very least, not worth the complete dehumanization and destruction of the other side), but that point can be much closer to one of the extremes than centrists would be comfortable to even consider. Finding that point, of course, is not easy - certainly not as easy as picking one side (or picking the exact center) as your dogma.

I agree 100%. You could have a regulated market in economic sectors where that makes sense. But is it socialist, or is it capitalism? If it works, does it matter?

The relationship between economics and ideology is basically the same as the relationship between engineering and marketing. I guess you have to have marketing to sell the engineering to people, but sure as hell don’t want marketing people making engineering decisions. That’s how you end up with doors popping out of airplanes.

I don’t really believe in the left/right/centrist paradigm. It’s only useful as shorthand to describe political parties. I can say in my country party X is left, party Y is center-left, party Z is right and you’ll get a general idea of the politics of my country. But it’s just a made up thing. Different generations face different issues, different countries face different issues and those issues just get grouped together somewhat arbitrarily and the grouping that feels like it’s left wing get called that and those that feel like it’s right wing get called that. But taking that left/right thing too seriously just results in people opposing something simply because the other side wants it. Or voting against their own self interst simply because they identify as left or right or socialist or anarcho-libertarian-marxist-anti-colonialist or whatever. It’s all really silly isn’t it?

We have serious problems these days and it feels like people spend more time debating which team they’re on rather than actually discussing the actual issues.