Why so much contempt in your heart Woj?
[WS:] Good question - I spent hours of psychotherapy trying to answer it. It looks that I feel threatened by authority, mortal certitude, unshaken beliefs, or self-righteousness - in short by people telling or signaling to me "do not believe what you see, believe what I am telling you." I used to associate those attitudes with the right and religion - towards whom I have a really visceral reaction.
This is what pushed me toward the left. I thought that the left would have opposite attitudes - uncertainty, perennial doubt and self-examination. However, after years spent with various left grouplets - including what? 10 or so years on lbo-talk - I was terribly disappointed to discover that it ain't so. The lefties simply reverse the signs - what right-wingers see as positive, the lefties see as negative and vice versa - but both are equally zealous, rigid-minded, and self-righteous in _how_ they espouse their respective party lines. Not all, of course, but enough to make it a strong tenor.
So this was disappointing indeed - like coming for porn but getting cultural analysis instead as "Bitch" irreverently put it. That disappointment explains my contempt. People generally do not get disappointed when they do not get what they do not expect. They get disappointed when they expect one thing and get something else of inferior quality instead.
PS. To answer the remainder of your comment - social regulations is as much a part of what you call the "capitalist system" as the price structure and competition (aka market.) The difference between "capitalism" and "socialism" is not really about social regulations vs markets but about different proportions of each. The proportion or mix of regulations and markets developed under the label "capitalism" proved superior to the mix developed under the label "socialism."
Wojtek