is capitalism a competitive thing; best thing we've got?

There are plenty of economic models that can be experimented with. Some have and been brought to fruition and then failed. For those of us with the power to alter the world's economy, usually politicians, they need only be given the power to express what there vision entails.

 For example, in a truly capitalist's society, there would be strict leanings toward ridding the economy of social security benefits. Americans are already living in a socialist economy, but it is not as extreme as some of the models. For example, Biden isn't as strong or as extensive in his socialism as Bernie. Another case example, is comparing Denmark's taxation policy to that of America. One is far more socialist. They are both democratic and at any time in the economic experimentation than can vote to move left or right. 

As far as competition is concerned it can be a very complex subject. It is inherent in capitalisms and it helps to result in many benefits and for others losses. 

For you, I suggest reading or listening to videos on what is called an RBE (resource based economy). There is also some practical wisdom in studying all the economies that have existed in Asia. leaning, as they have, towards communism.

Informing people about such things is a passion in life, and I am trying as hard as I can to turn it into capital in this Economy.

If measuring ourselves against others—their feats or advantages—stimulates feelings akin to envy or competitiveness, beware! These are negative emotions, incompatible with God’s thinking.

You're reasonably correct.

As much as is in your power, maximize your own capital and social safety net; that includes education and specialization, and savings account and retirement investments, and understanding the wisdom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_o...  By such, one avoids the sociopathy of perversions of self-help and of collectivist domination.

By the nature of individualism and "darwinian" processing, the capitalist approach tends to be less oppressive politically, as well as more dynamic economically, than herd collectivism.

The more sociopathic the capitalist and/or communist leadership are, the more the majority of the people suffer.  Thus the errors of naive communism are primarily what Lenin categorized as infantile leftism--e.g., the Freudian oral stage of dominating the mother as food supplier becomes the red dragon of sociopathic intelligentsia leaching off the nanny state.  Lenin's question--how to retain power--was recast by Gramsci as events showed the superiority of specialized labor--which Marx did not conceptualize, his "infantile leftism" (or, "this communist sh!t," as he later called it) erroneously fantasizing an infantile notion of interchangeable labor roles.  Along with this post-leninist era Western economic vigor and pie expansion per innovation, and increased worker productivity per increased capital investment in means of production, was the regrettable (to Godless sensualist marxists) and unforeseen strength of Western values of citizen honesty, religiosity, and so forth--thus Gramsci denied and inverted Marx's fantasied hypothesis of workers' behavior largely shaped by means of production; instead, Gramsci, and then post-Stalin era Communists, and their fellow-travelers in the Frankfurt School, began emphasizing the subversion of Western values by the sensual libertine values of the soulless, using drugs, sex, and other rewards.

Currently the Marxist/Communist model is largely discredited, e.g. in China, which uses a mercantilist approach augmented by surveillance state tactics to ride to a greater hegemonism.  The world global elites are following suit, or kowtowing; thus the synthesis of tech and capital is decades beyond the free society with a safety net, which has been the fortunate lot of many Americans, after the struggle between early 20th c corporatism and union pushback reached an uneasy, consumer-focused peace.  As the American people have in some degree taken a lesser path of sensate hedonism, to that degree they've abrogated the enlightened values of 18th c Founders and their Pilgrim predecessors to the point of accepting a neo-marxism (based on race guilt rather than on class guilt), which in turn presents the global planners with a likely opportunity to replace a sensate and declining American culture--corrupted in part by gramscian tactics--with the oligarchic, post-free market corporate fascism, which is the dictatorship beyond the Plutocratic-World Communism agonism.  Examples of the oligarchic corporate fascism include recent French criticism of American "infantile wokeness," and the more traditional systems of fascism in which oligarchs dictate perimeters of corporate endeavor, in the service of somewhat-nationalistic (notably Russian and Chinese) traditions or value structures, neither of which are remotely "free market Republics."  Thus the great experiment in Freedom which was America's truly novel and exceptional gift to the world political scene has potentially sputtered into license, not Liberty, and to the degree that that libertine tendency prevails, so the oligarchies of national corporate techno-fascism will rise, principally in China and Russia--the latter more a threat due to its inordinate militarism, than to a more economically sound corporate fascism, such as China's mercantilism.  

CHAT VIOLATION REPORTED.