Correlation does not imply causation. But let me break it down further for you.
With statistics, you can prove anything you are predisposed to, goes the saying. And more importantly, correlation does not imply causation. Or, not everything that can be counted can be counted on. The depravity of reason is the source of man’s popular confounding of consequence (statistics in this case) and cause (a system inducing specific behavior of participants).
With the findings from statistics reduced in relevance, let’s dissect socialism and free-market capitalism.
First, as I’ve answered many times before, neither socialism nor capitalism is a system. Instead, they are each symptom omnipresent in each other. Socialism, a fancy phrase for group-think, is ubiquitous in capitalism. And capitalism, as the remuneration of value, is ubiquitous in socialism. Such minimal mutual exclusivity makes it moot to compare the two.
Second, we have never had any free-markets because our current definition of freedom to which a free-market must be subjugated to, is a hollow supposition of make-believe. Today’s implementation of freedom is an oligarchic monism in-and-of-itself, quite the opposite of free. Hence for humanity to – for the first time – deploy our best proxy of free-market systems we must first honor a relativity theory of freedom by which the definition and implementation of freedom itself is freed.
The relevance of hindsight is severely eroded by our man-made economic voodoo, fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the assets (people) it is supposed to trace. Let alone the extrapolation of such disheveled hindsight ever becoming a reliable proxy to foresight that breaks the norm.
We must reinvent the human operating-systems to trace and promote the diverse nature of humanity reliably. We must ditch our beliefs in a stale religion of economics stuck in absolutism, and instead invent a dynamic relativity theory compatible with the very nature of humanity. Only then will those systems produce the responsible behavior we can count on.