I was going to say a Naboo starfighter
I'm not sure malls really are a "pillar of capitalism", something akin to stores will exist in virtually any economic system, because ultimately their function in the economy is to distribute the results of production to individuals that need it, regardless of who exactly owns or profits off them, and the need for a function like that is virtually universal.
What malls are really is an attempt to recreate the experience of a busy pedestrian street, for a place that is heavy on car use and so doesn't have many of those spaces. Hence you get a bunch of shops together in a space that lets one conveniently walk between them.
Very few advocate for the total elimination of cars, just that they are very, very overrepresented in terms of amount of infrastructure built and city design. The argument isn't to take cars off the table, but that they shouldn't be be the default option, and therefore that cities shouldn't be built assuming that most will have and use one. Because when you build assuming their use, you tend to create a place that requires them, and makes life very difficult for anyone that cannot or will not use one.
I'm in an apartment in a city right now, I really do not notice the neighbors. Apartments are absolutely not as small as cells, unless you're living somewhere with an extreme land shortage like Hong Kong or something (and even then, the conditions will be more comfortable than a literal prison), or somewhere with some extremely progressive prisons.
For that matter, saying you don't have much freedom of movement unless you're walking or biking is a bit like saying you can't communicate with people unless you talk to them; being able to just leave your front door and walk to places you want to go, to include to stuff like train or bus stations for longer trips (which in turn can reach stuff like airports or car rentals for even longer ones), is freedom of movement.
If anything, having a car as the only good option is much less free, since one is required to acquire a license from the government to use it at all, which they can at any moment revoke and leave you with the choice of resorting to crime, relying on others to move you, or being stuck in one's own home.
No, it really doesn't, unless one simply does not know what "prison" means. Improving access to transportation is entirely counter to the point of a prison, given that the primary characteristic of a prison is being hard to leave.
I mean, that isnt really an argument against public transit and bike infrastructure, its just an argument that the way to do it isnt to just tell people to stop driving and expect it to happen, one has to redesign cities to make these options feel like the safe and natural choice.
It isnt like the rest of the world doesnt have rural areas, unless one lives in like singapore or something. Something like 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most trips arent trips between cities except perhaps for those that are close to one another anyways. So even if one accepts that rural areas are car centric by nature, that still leaves the vast majority of the population that isnt affected by that. The buildings within cities being spread out over a wide space making transit less efficient is a failure of city design rather than something fundamental and unchangeable about the US, we have a fairly serious housing shortage anyways, if we really wanted to decrease car dependence we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
Cars also travel along previously laid paths. I mean, technically there are off road ones that dont have to, but unless youre on your own land trying to get from one place to another without following the roads wont go so well.
But the reasoning given doesnt apply exclusively to horses. Suppose we follow the same chain that gets us "all horses are the same color", but replace "horses" with "colors", we would end up with the statement that all colors are the same color. Thus, this is not a counterexample, because black and brown are the same color.
My headcanon for this is that the events between the early 21st century and the show's time, given they were full of some rather devastating wars, led to the true history of what he actually was like getting largely forgotten, leaving his pr campaigns the main source of information history has to go on him, and this leaving the people of the future with an idea of who he was that is much nicer than reality.
I don't think they could actually stop such a technology from being deployed on earth in such a scenario. Nor do I think they would really object, it seems doubtful to me that they would all want to go to mars, and for those that don't, trying to prevent it's use is counter to their interests.
To be fair, if they really were just living lavishly and not using their wealth to amass more wealth like some kind of wealth black hole, then the extreme expenditure of such a lifestyle would one day drain their money dry, since they couldnt possibly actually earn enough to live like that. Were it not for the effect of wealth begetting more wealth, the issue you refer to would eventually solve itself.