Before we can approach designing a socioeconomic system intended to bring peace and prosperity to humanity, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question. That question is, "What is the purpose of organized society?" I would say it is to bring the highest possible quality of life to the largest number of people. Let's look at some of the main social systems humanity has tried in the past.

Some sort of organized society always has, and always will exist, simply because large numbers of people are forced to interact on this planet. Without organization there would be anarchy, and some people believe that is the way things should be. Complete freedom to do anything you please sounds like a good thing, but the actual result of anarchy is chaos, where the strong devourer the less strong, and those who gain power use it to prevent others from gaining it. Anarchy can not in fact exist, because there will always be a few who grab power and force others to conform to their rules. If there are rules, anarchy does not exist.

Opposite of anarchy is communism. The fundamental principle of communism is, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." Government owns all business enterprises, and as wealth is generated the rewards are to be spread equally among all the people. No one is supposed to be any better or worse off than anyone else, and in theory there is complete equality. But communism fails because individuals are inspired to achieve the greatest ratio of reward to effort by having the fewest abilities and the greatest needs. The desires of the individual are secondary to the needs of the masses, which means personal freedoms are highly regulated and mass communication is tightly controlled. And in practice a ruling elite always ends up taking control, live much better lives than the masses, and are able to maintain their power because no opposition is allowed.

Capitalism is similar to anarchy in that those with the capital, win. In it's pure form business is unregulated and everyone is supposed to have the same opportunity to achieve greater wealth through there own efforts. In practice the lack of regulation results in monopolies which artificially inflate prices, pollution is unrestrained, no social services are provided, including basics like fire, police, education and health care, and no real opportunity exists for the poor because as everyone knows, it takes money to make money. Current forms of capitalism are modified by laws allowing for the collection of taxes to provide at least some basic social services, but because the most wealthy control the political system tax burdens are shifted to the less fortunate and only minimal services are provided. The majority of people benefit little from capitalism, even in it's more humane form.

Socialism is a system where business is highly regulated while still allowing some individuals to gain greater wealth than others. At one extreme it is essentially communism, where government owns and administers all businesses. At the other extreme our current forms of capitalism are modified by socialism, since businesses are regulated and taxed in order to provide services to the people in general. In the U.S. the emphasis is on capitalism, so we might consider our current system to be socialistic-capitalism. (It should be noted that "socialism" is also defined in Marxist theory as a transitional state between capitalism and communism. Because of that, the word "socialism" by itself is probably inappropriate for use in describing non-communist economic systems.)

A successful economy requires that incentives exist to inspire individuals to be motivated toward producing those products and services which add to the quality of life for society as a whole. The opportunity to gain greater wealth has always been an effective incentive, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. However, the unfair distribution of wealth that has always existed in the past, where a small minority owns the vast majority of the wealth, is not compatible with the fundamental principle of creating the highest quality of life for the largest number of people.

We can see that all of the above systems appear to fall short in some way. The most successful to date appears to be the socialistic-capitalism model, but with the emphasis on capitalism big business is the prime beneficiary while the majority of the population are merely slaves to the economy. The goal of producing the highest quality of life for the largest number of people would require the emphasis to be on socialism, on the benefit of the masses rather than the benefit of the few. The term "capitalistic-socialism" can be applied to describe this type of socioeconomic system. Further essays here go into details of how such a system would operate, and how it is different from what we have experienced in the past.