There are still strong property rights and ownership of the economy should be more distributed, but they don't advocate for some elite government entity to come scoop up everything and decide who gets what or outlaw people from owning land and property.
Unlike capitalism, instead of a factory making some kind of widget or product (example: ice cream) that makes one individual very rich and provides a low salary to a hundred workers, you'd have thousands of people across the country doing all kinds of jobs like that and hopefully making a living wage. Unlike communism, you don't have a fully centralized power dictating all aspects of life.
I'm no expert on this theory though and it isn't perfect. Such a society probably doesn't build an iPhone...maybe that is the point haha. Or maybe it can, but I'm guessing technological advancements and discoveries would take longer with less efficiency and specialization.
You can only extract profit from the margin of efficiency your capital adds. If people can artisanally make ice cream for $1/cone, and a million-dollar factory can make it for 10¢/cone, you can extract some portion of that 90¢. If the efficiency gains aren't large enough or you don't pass enough of your gains on to the consumers, you'll just out-competed by the artisans. So it's unfortunately the biggest innovations that hurt workers and benefit consumers the most.
Under capitalism, as soon as some business owner gets rich, everybody else goes into business to compete with him. This drives up the demand for labor and hence wages.
First, the competition is only in markets with free competition where everyone can compete. There are many market structures within a capitalist society (example - monopolies or where other barriers to entry exist) where this simply isn't true in some large scale way. Maybe you say that isn't true capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that actually exists.
Think about fast food wages still being at minimum wage in a lot of places despite widespread competition. McDonald's CEO is rich, but their employees are still on welfare. Wages only went up during the pandemic when labor became scarce.
Everyone? Only one competitor is needed to provide competition.
Fast food wages translate directly into how the fast food is priced. Increasing min wages for fast food workers is followed immediately by price increases.
When you said "everybody else goes into business to compete with him"
I was just trying to say this isn't true in a lot of cases due to a wide range of barriers to entry. This can be legal (patents or regulations), natural monopolies like telecom...etc.
You said competition leads to higher wages and I stated that hasn't been true in a lot of places and used fast food as an example. Your response, while true doesn't seem to be relevant to what I was saying.
I know you're a lot smarter than me, so we're probably just talking past each other :)
