Maryland abolishes death penalty.

[shoju]

Well Kandrathe, you are looking at things very much form your local perspective.
The capitalist world (yes also China, Russia, India behave capitalist) contains a billion people who are at risk of starving and even a few billion below the poverty line.
We can't conclude that capitalism 'works'. Maybe we will in the future, maybe it is the best system possible, but there is absolutely no reason to be smug and satisfied about it. Well unless you live in the US and have a nice laptop with a 100MB internet connection of course.

And on the contrary, we can't say that capitalism doesn't work, because a select group of countries have starving people.

To do so, would be to isolate capitalism as the reason for the problem, and ignore anything else that could possibly be the problem.

I would argue that capitalism isn't the problem, or at least isn't the sole problem with hunger in capitalist based countries. If it was the problem, then how is it that with the distribution of wealth that the US has, we don't have an "africa-esque" starvation problem, with people dying in the streets en masse?

Could Capitalism be a contributing factor? Absolutely.
Is Capitalism the sole factor? Not even close.