You’re missing the part of capitalism that deals with capital.
If your organization is, say, an automobile company, you can’t just get together with your friends and say “hey, let’s make cars and sell them”. You need a factory building, you need tools, etc., etc., long before you see any cars. The difference between capitalism and socialism, broadly speaking, is the difference between depending on private or public money to finance that initial investment.
Efficiency is not everything. If you steal something from me, it's incredibly efficient for me to come over to your house with a gun, but nobody would argue that it's moral. We should be looking to make a society that's morally acceptable first, and then optimizing for efficiency afterwards.
Secondly, while capitalism is efficient on paper, it often isn't in the real world. There's no such thing as a free market, and nepotism, politicking, and incompetence still run rampant. Every societal system has its share of problems.
I've come to believe that efficiency itself is moral. A system that perfectly adheres to all the nice-sounding deontological principles you can name, but leaves everyone in poverty, is less moral than a system with a few dashes of violence and injustice that leaves nearly everyone much better off.
I'd certainly agree that I have fairly utilitarian leanings. I _used_ to be super hardcore minarchist Libertarian. Maximizing everyone's happiness is a worthy goal.
I'm just not 100% sure what the best way to get there is. I don't think that just because the system kind of works okay now means that it will forever.
I _used_ to be super hardcore minarchist Libertarian.
Yeah, me too. And I think you're still making the same mistake I used to, in a different sense--you're picking nice-sounding, moralistic idealism over pragmatism.
Of the systems so far tested, some sort of Stateful mixed economy seems the best.[1] Of the parameters you can adjust in that system, we have observed various effects. The way to find whatever political truths we can is the same as the way to find other truths--empiricism. Empiricism is hard, especially with political systems, but it's better than moralistic or idealistic handwaving of any variety. It's not terribly convincing to philosophize about a political ideal. Why not take what we've got and find evidence-based ways of improving it?
[1] Of the systems so far untested, we have no data. They might turn out to be complete disasters, impossible to implement, or so strange almost no one outside a few logically-minded dogmatists would possibly agree to them. I would actually support voluntary social experiments in setting up different political systems, but you would have to make them compatible in some way with the status quo without hurting the validity of the experiment. Large scale nature preserves with small numbers of primitivists, protected by an existing State from redevelopment of the land or hostile violence from anti-primitivists, would be one example of this. Another is similar to something interestingly adopted by China: the "special economic zone".
If your organization is, say, an automobile company, you can’t just get together with your friends and say “hey, let’s make cars and sell them”. You need a factory building, you need tools, etc., etc., long before you see any cars. The difference between capitalism and socialism, broadly speaking, is the difference between depending on private or public money to finance that initial investment.