I hear a lot of people claiming how capitalism is the root of all evil. People need to realize that capitalism does not mean people should be greedy. It is simply a type of market economy. The root of all evil is greed. Suppose a man makes a fortune in a capitalist system and gives all his money to charity. Suppose then another man makes a fortune and keeps it all, never helping anyone. Both scenarios exist in a capitalist world. The difference is greed. Capitalism is fantastic. Greed is evil.
Capitalism nurtures greed and selfishness as personality traits - it's a consequence of economic property and its pursuit. It is the 'culture of capitalism'. It's a shame the 'human nature' argument gets repeated so much - it's great propaganda, but it also flies in the face of everything we know of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. Capitalism can exist without a liberalized market. The requirements for capitalism are: wage labor, private ownership of economic property, general commodity production. Those three go into creating and accumulating capital. The capital controllers can be the heads of large corporations, small business owners, or even simply a single government (USSR, Yugoslavia, Albania, North Korea, South Korea pre-liberalization, Vietnam, etc). The state of the market (free market vs planned economy) is irrelevant. Capital makes capitalism, period. All wealth is created from labor - the semi-exception (not completely) being primitive accumulation during the early development of capitalism (ex, randomly seizing land as capital because you say so even if you're expelling people in the process, like eminent domain on steroids). The workers must produce more than they are paid in order to be considered useful. They are making the capitalist rich as he or she extracts surplus value during the process of wage labor (generating more capital in the process). Post-hoc justifications such as "risk" are irrelevant as risk is created by the existence of a market, not the other way around (ex. the market does not exist because of risk). The 'wealth' belongs to the people. They have been robbed.