[QUOTE=thomas;47655]What’s the alternative?
Because of capitalism we have all kinds of good things, including hospitals and cures for diseases which would have killed people in their youth in pre-capitalistic days.[/quote]
There are hospitals and universities in communist countries too 
In fact the very first country to have hospitals and universities was India, and that was not capitalist, but had its own Vedic system of society.
Therefore, it is not because of capitalism that we have hospitals and universities etc, otherwise communist countries and the Vedic system of society would not have them.
At what point does it become evil?
It’s just a system. A system isn’t evil. Sure there could be evil people exploiting it, but I think any other system could be exploited in worse ways.
The system itself is based on exploitation. This is basic sociology that we get at school. Capitalism thrives on creating surplus value. It goes a bit like this: the workers works for the capitalists(the ones that own the capital, land and means of production) in exchange for wages. The worker createss for the capitalist the product which the capitalists then sell on the market at a higher value than was used to make it and creating a huge profit for the capitalist. The wage the worker gets paid is extremely disproportionate to the profit that they make from selling the product(the workers made!) thus creating a surplus value for the capitalist. In other words the worker is exploited by the capitalist.
Hilariously, then the workers uses the wages they made to buy the products that they contributed in making, thus giving back capital to the capitalist. The worker is alienated from the product they made. The product becomes the property of the capitalist. The profit, i.e., the surplus value, become the profit of the capitalist.
In order to generate more profit the capitalist has to undercut the wage of the workers. In order to compete with other capitalists the capitalist must lower the price of their product, but by cutting prices they have to simultaneuosly get their profit from elsewhere, and this happens at the workers expense. Today, capitalists can give us cheap products(televisions, clothes, laptops, cars) but they do so by outsourcing their work to cheap labour in third world countries, where the workers are paid abysmally low wages. As a consequence workers in the first world lose jobs.
The capitalists can make even greater profit by cutting the number of workers and replacing them with machines(automation) and increase their productivity and effiency. Today, many jobs that were previously done by workers are now done by machines. As a consequence jobs are lost.
A major contradiction which exists within capitalism is the tendency towards monopolization. Capitalist companies with one another and the one with greater purchasing power buys out the smaller company, as a result capital starts to fall into fewer and fewer hands and capitalists get richer, richer and even more richer and the gap widens between the capitalists and the workers. The extent of the power of companies today is such that they could buy out most countries in the world and have their own armies. This was not the case a few hundred years ago.
These three major contradictions in capitalism 1) undercutting the wages of workers 2) automation and 3) monopolization make capitalism a completely unsustinable system. This is why Marx said that capitalism has its own seeds of destruction. Hence why capitalism has historically been in crisis(wall street crash, great depression, recessions, global economic meltdown)
Capitalism works great… exceedingly great… for the rich. It allows them to keep almost all the capital in the world to themselves and everybody else just becomes a pauper. It can be seen today with the gradual disappearance of the middle classes in the first world countries, with the masses becoming equally pauperized. It can equally be seen just how powerful capitalists are today and how they are able to control everything in the world(foreign policies, international law, international regulations) and even decisions to go to war are based on capitalist intervention(Iraq etc) Weber called this beaurocratic capitalism.
In the end the future we are heading towards with capitalism is a refeadualized world where a very select and elite few control the world and the rest are dominated and controlled. A global technocratic dystopia. It might as well be ancient Sumeria.
In the US a person can be in an independent business with practially nothing, and build up to something substantial. There is room for all to grow and prosper, and this growth and prosperity is not at the expense of making someone else poorer.
Yep, and what happens to those small independent businesses eventually? They get bought out by the huge multinational monopolies. Capitalism is tipped in the favour of the rich. It is money that talks. A small independent company simply cannot compete. It is no surprise that the richest and most powerful families in the world have historically always been rich and come from elite families going back hundreds of years.