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In a socialized system you'd have the same thing, except perpetuated by bureaucrats instead of businessmen.

If anything, capitalism has an advantage in that it's at least theoretically possible to mitigate the effect of greed on politics. Throwing all your eggs into the government basket gives you no such recourse.

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The general population controls so little of the economic might that this just isn't true. We could pool our votes to change the course of politics. If we pooled our dollars nobody would care.

There's nothing stopping you from pooling your votes right now.

Ownership of capital has basically nothing to do with it. If the means of production are owned by "the workers", all that ends up happening is each group of workers sends a representative to manage their share of the means of production. Unless you have a true Athenian direct democracy, it reduces to exactly the same system, just less diversified.

The Volkswagen emissions scandal demonstrated that mitigating effects will be circumvented given the presence of a profit motive. Rather than construct an elaborate and exploitable maze of incentives, perhaps it would be simpler to remove the profit motive.

That's my point. Capitalism or socialism, greed is greed. There is always a profit motive.

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