Pot kettle black. I said the economist's justification is that capitalism "heads in the direction of" equilibrium, benefitting society in an optimal way on paper, as it were. The optimality is never reached, but those economies improve all along the way, asymptotically. That's the same as saying that capitalism "improves living standards in a consistent way." The difference is only that positing the equilibria is supposed to explain that happy pattern in scientific terms.