China's need for transportation and telecommunications infrastructure alone could absorb much of the world's capital supply. America's deteriorating infrastructure needs a great deal of capital as well. As governments retreat from these investments under the pressure of budget deficits, vast new opportunities open up for investors. Sooner or later the central banks of the United States, Japan, and Germany, forced to recognize that the inflationary dangers of the 1990s are not those of the 1970s and 1980s, will relent and allow real growth rates to accelerate beyond their current low limits. Democracies are not forever going to allow the misguided fears of unelected central bankers to limit growth in ways that destroy both the economic system and democracy itself.
Capitalism also comes with an automatic feedback mechanism that prevents a gross excess of capacity.
Seeing falling returns on new investments, capitalists consume their income rather than saving and investing it. Interest payments are up since the early 1970s. Governments with great power to manage trade and business firms with great power to avoid government management cannot simultaneously exist. Greider rightly points out, The ideas and programs that formed the modern welfare state originated from the values of the right as well as the left, from the conservative religious impulse to defend the domain of family, community and church against the raw, atomizing effects of market economics as well as from the egalitarianism of anti-capitalist socialism. The welfare state was, in fact, an attempt to devise a fundamental compromise between society and free-market capitalism.