Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Europe in my view is mostly a free market with a generous safety net, which is not socialism in itself.  They also have quite high taxes on the middle and lower middle.

Also globalization. Low-skill workers aren't just competing with other low-skill Americans and low-skill immigrants (legal or not). They're competing with low-skill workers in foreign countries where the prevailing wages are a fraction of what they are here.

This is true but only to an extent.  Sure, we can offshore the building of widgets and ship the widgets back from Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, China, Timbucktoo, etc.  We can't offshore the mowing of your lawn or the drywalling of your new house.  

So they ARE competing with the global pool for some jobs but not all.  

That was the point of the graph I made which showed income distribution when government transfers and taxes are added in. You may claim that "real wages" have been stagnant in the lower quintiles for 40+ years, but the poor have actually made real gains over those years. What you're advocating for is actually happening.

The truth is that capitalism / the free market is the greatest prosperity engine that humanity has ever seen. It's the goose laying golden eggs. It's not perfect. It doesn't account for everyone. So use capitalism to generate the wealth and government to help those who are left behind. DON'T completely screw up the system and kill the goose by destroying all incentives that make capitalism work.

It's like our health care system. It's got all the bad parts of capitalism and all the bad parts of socialism. Most of Europe has all the bad parts of socialism, and none of the good parts of capitalism. You know who got it right? The Swiss. Their system has the good parts of capitalism and the good parts of socialism. I may ideologically be a libertarian, but I'm also an engineer. I recognize when someone has designed something that works.

I'm not down on capitalism, I was just copying the phrase you used.  Capitalism is great.  But like a few bad apples ruining things for the rest of us (PSA checkpoints, women not going out alone at night, no booze on Sundays (wait, that's a ton of bad apples (j/k)), I think those who are driven towards unlimited growth/wealth/power/influence largely ruin capitalism.  
There is a mighty, mighty chasm between having a few trillionaires and 30% of the populace being poor AND any sort of idealized version of socialism.  
Hell, maybe the same type of person that easily ruins socialism is the one trying his best to ruin capitalism, idk.

All I'm honestly advocating for here is some skinning off the top to give to the connected bottom.
Amazon is the perfect example.  Does anyone here have a problem with something like 1% of Bezos' take-home going towards simply improving the conditions for the warehouse workers?  Is that such a radical idea?

Again, this presupposes that robber barons were MORE ethical than today's CEO's.  Really? 

I don't see that presupposition.  Can you essplain?

On this I agree with you absolutely so lets stop importing more unskilled and low-skill laborers who make the rich richer (by mowing @betarhoalphadelta 's yard for example) and make the poor poorer by competing with the pre-existing Americans who would otherwise take jobs like that. 

We all would like illegal immigration to stop and for a functional legal immigration system to work better.

You're now freed up to leave that hill and expand your topics of conversation.

I don't see that presupposition.  Can you essplain?

Why was income inequality so much lower in the 1960's?  

If it is caused by corporate greed then it's absence must be caused by the absence of corporate greed, no?  

Europe in my view is mostly a free market with a generous safety net, which is not socialism in itself.  They also have quite high taxes on the middle and lower middle.

I'll admit to not knowing as much "on the ground" in Europe, and clearly in current parlance invoking Heritage is probably not the best source, but they do happen to have an index based on economic freedom:

https://www.heritage.org/index/pages/all-country-scores

The Swiss, Ireland, the Nordics, and (perhaps surprisingly?) some of the former Soviet nations score highly. When you start getting into the bulk of Western Europe, though, things start to falter. 

My understanding is that a lot of it is due to protectionism and a lot of government involvement in large corporations. Not enough to call them "state-sponsored" in the way China does it, but that certain entities--let's say companies like Airbus--are "too big to fail' and the decisions related to their business can't happen without state involvement. 

In a general sense, you can say they're capitalist with a robust social safety net, but when you look at places like France where the national pastime is "going on strike", it might suggest that the balance maybe went too far in one direction...