If you really want to understand why the economy is the way it is, and what we can do to improve it without violating anyone's natural rights, then I would suggest reading the following books. Links are given to free, legal versions. Regardless of your personal political inclinations, I think you will find something of value in all of these books, if not of the normative sort, then at the very least of the descriptive sort.
We don't really live in a capitalist socio-cultural-economic system. Our system is really more accurately described as "neoliberalism-neofeudalism". What most people incorrectly perceive as defects of "capitalism" really have nothing to do with capitalism, proper, but with the neofeudal rent-seeking behavior that is a result of economic monopoly privileges which enable private owners to privatize what is essentially the common wealth of humanity.
These books make the argument, none of them for the first time in the history of human scholarship, that all the living have an equal and common right to the gifts and produce of Nature, and that our failure to recognize and uphold this principle is at the root of literally everything wrong with human civilization.
"Neoliberalism", by contrast, is the dominant ideology of our times, and is in broad terms the ideology which seeks to apply market economy principles to all spheres of human life, regardless of consequences. To understand what is meant by neoliberalism better, I would suggest Simon Glendinning's paper,
Varieties of Neoliberalism (2015).
1.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879). This actually should be at the top of everyone's required reading list. It's one of the most important books in history, particularly on the topic of political economy (which is more or less the philosophy of economics, rather than the mechanics of economics). In the years following its publication, it became the most popular book in the English language, after the Christian Bible, and resulted in the passage and ratification of Amendment XVI to the Constitution of the United States. Sadly, George's economic philosophies largely fell by the wayside, in the wake of WWI and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, and have since been forgotten by most, to our detriment.
2.
Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization (1929). Borsodi gives a very insightful breakdown of how the factory system of production and the drive for efficiency results in a race to the bottom.
3.
John Sherwin Crosby, The Orthocratic State (1915). Crosby, like Borsodi, was a follower of Henry George, and I might say this book should be read even before
Progress and Poverty, because it's much shorter, and lays out a plan that ties Georgist principles directly to the legitimacy of governance and how governments ought therefore to be structured.
