Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.
Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.
No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.
Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.
Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.
It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.
Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.
You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.
At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.
It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.
They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.
That is a very strong statement.
But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."
Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.
The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.