True understanding starts with a definition.

Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit with prices determined by the forces of supply and demand in a free market. It's characterized by voluntary exchange, competition, and the pursuit of profit.

Profit must be in purchasing power. This requires a stable store of value, a monetary property of the currency which no longer holds true.

Socialism is a system where the means of production are transferred from private ownership to collective or state ownership (in secret or public), resulting in a centralized planning authority controlling all production and distribution.

The key here is in the concept of ownership. Ownership is the right to dispose of the assets at a loss as an individual.

Free-markets require independent adversarial decision-making without cooperation, but money-printing via gifts, or more commonly non-reserve debt issuance/loans like AT&T or other companies with loans > assets, forces cooperation resulting in artificial distortions (such as artificial supply constraints to raise price levels) that grow until no profit (in purchasing power) can be made. This is shown in a long-term trend towards few companies holding the majority of marketshare.

Since money-printing is a function of the state, this meets the rigorous definition of the system we live under right now being socialism, specifically market socialism, since there are still some independent businesses out there; but when you have one entity constrained by loss function and the other is not, that other will always win. When most private business fails, it fails to non-market socialism (but it hasn't happened quite yet, current projections by people who know say it may be 2027-2030).

That wouldn't be so bad if the system was sustainable but we've known since the 1930s that non-market socialism fails to 6 intractable problems. One of which, is a hysteresis problem that can only be solved by having perfect future sight (an impossibility). The absence of a working system leads to socio-economic collapse.

Malthus and Catton have described what happens under these scenarios. TL;DR food production without modern supply chains only supports 4bn people globally, we have ~8.2bn, and during a malthusian reversion the flows are destroyed during pre-crisis extraction stage, so the sustainable population is a fraction of what it may have been in the past. If you have 8.2bn people, and you can only suddenly feed 2bn people. Who decides who lives and who starves/dies, the older people or the younger people? Maybe the children get to go first. Unthinkable sure, but that's how these things often happen.

Profit in purchasing power must still be made under state-run apparatus which is why the chaotic distortions occur. Corners are cut, regulatory kicks in when people die, shortages ensue, and it can't self-correct because the costs to enter the business are exceeded because the price floor money-printers have set up.

For the last 30 years, the vast majority of everyone's life has become poorer. The options they've had available have dissappeared, their agency has been taken, and the services they pay for have enshittified. These are signs Mises warned about in the 1930s, but few today have the education or cognitive ability (having been tortured their entire lives), to rationally follow the material.

Under socialism, there is only one inevitable outcome, and the environment is fundamentally chaotic preventing us from taking any effective action to self-correct under it. Although these failures are indirect, allowing people to deceitfully claim its something else than what it is to justify ever more control, it doesn't change the facts.

The money printing experiment the Fed in conjunction with the leaders chosen by the boomer generation, forces a society that has no hope or future.

It steals money from future generations to make the current generation comfortable, leaving nothing left. That is their legacy, and there will be very few who will survive it (if any).

Totalism makes the population hopelessly dependent on the state which will fail as a matter of course because at the same time it prevents any kind of adaptation to the issues. An abstract failure of darwin's fitness test, existentially for humanity.

Similar things have happened in the far past, but because of chaos and the distance in time, few if any records remains. The most similar type of collapse to what seems to be happening is the bronze age collapse.

A sea-faring people of cruel intelligence, who look just like us, and who came and disappeared and destroyed all civilizations at that time not through war but by chaos, subterfuge, and deceit.

The only thing we have left are the legends passed by word of mouth, that are more aptly stories that seem more fiction than real, of terrible cruelly intelligent gods that were mistaken for people, who were capricious and enjoyed tormenting mortals in their odyssey's and beyond.