Boy looks like the Adam Smith society decided to spend all day on CIF knockings the lefties. What we need to appreciate here is the historical point at which capitalism has reached, which the writer is alluding to. It may have been the best system thus far designed for creating wealth but, it isnt doing it very well anymore. Mostly it is creating debt and inequality. As wealth cascades upwards and the middle and bottom get squeezed, the system increasingly relies on debt to fuel growth. Real wages have been stagnating in the advanced countries for some time, in USA for decades.
But the debt model of growth is unsustainable. However, capitalism is like a shark which must stay in constant motion or die. Capitalism requires continuous expansion or it dies. In the case of companies this leads to pathological behaviour, whether capitalists are nice or not. So all this blather on the wonders of the free market is really missing the point. The free market does not describe the world we live in. The free market is flat but the world we live in is a mushroom, with an ever heavier head bearing down on a trunk that can no longer support it. It is moving towards collapse.
Of course, capitalism has survived crises before. But it has done this during periods of expansion. Now that it has expanded into all corners of the world, it has nowhere else to go. The shark is trapped. Only China, and perhaps India, are keeping it going. If they can grow as they have been, without suffering their own internal crises, then Asia could save capitalism for another few decades. And who knows, after that, perhaps Africa. Capitalism thrives where there are untapped markets, and enough cheap labour to create super profits. These exist in Asia and Africa, and in the former communist countries of eastern Europe. Stalinism did a big favour to capitalism by turning people against socialism by oppressing them and making them poor and desperate for material improvements.
But China and India are not enough. India has too much poverty and has too many barriers to internal expansion at the rate needed to absorb excess western capital, while China is sitting on too much fiat currency (dollars). China will need to rapidly expand consumption at home while buying out the West. But America is not happy being in debt and being owned by China. That is its future but it is thrashing around like a wounded animal and it is going to cause damage to the world economy as it finally reaches its crisis point and has to cede global power to China. China will sooner or later have to tell America where to get off, and it won’t be pretty because Americans believe their own myths of exceptionalism. As they are unable to accept that there are limits to debt fuelled capitalism, and as the masses turn on the plutocrats and bankers who have made them miserable, I truly hope that the capitalist beast will finally be slayed. But it is such a voracious monster it will do anything to survive, including starting wars and creating new enemies and paranoia. The next decade or two could resemble the 20s and 30s of the last century. I hope they do mark the death throws of raw capitalism. Of course Chinese state capitalism may be the new model that takes the place of American capitalism. Lets face it, we are all state capitalists now - if not for the state, the system would have collapsed in October 2008. Instead the taxpayers (read working class and middle class) saved the billionaire bankers. How beautiful!
I got carried away in geopolitical futurology. The basic point is most people don't experience the wonders of most posters' vision of unending wealth creation under capitalism. Insecurity, debt, stagnant wages, unemployment. These are the common experiences of capitalism in the rich countries. never mind the poor ones. As Janet Jackson should h ave said: Capitalism, what have you done for me lately? The dumbest thing is that the true believers always think that the good fortune of a small minority justifies the exclusion of the majority from the fruits of the system. If less and less people feel that, the system loses its lustre.
