Thank you for this insightful comment. It really was a joy to read.

To some extent I feel you are avoiding the basic question, though. What do you think the solution is ? The only real argument in favour of capitalism is simply that it has survived where other systems have not. Natural selection.

Granted, economic systems haven't always failed for "good" reasons. Some were conquered. Others built an economy based on oil, and oil ran out. Others strip-mined colonies. Islam built it's civilization on slavery, and can be said to be a continuation of Rome (mostly of the bad parts of the Roman empire, but ...). But, like natural selection, there are no good and bad reasons, hell, there aren't even really (known) reasons at all, and it doesn't really matter "whose fault it is", they failed, and when they failed, that was the end of the road. Capitalism, by contrast, has risen from the ashes more times than a drunk pyromaniac phoenix.

The vast majority of critiques on capitalism are simply expressing a refusal to change (in some cases ironically). In a way, it's a form of conservatism, even if different from what we usually call conservatism. Or, in some cases, much worse : an attempt to resurrect dead societies (like the many attempts at resurrecting the caliphate we see now, hell, those even fight like the Roman empire did, which frankly justifies killing them all in my humble opinion, but ...). But sadly[1], there's a reason these societies died (and in the vast majority cases, like the islamic one for example : good riddance). If you resurrect them, that reason will simply surface again, and kill them in the cradle.

Right now we are in a boom phase of capitalism, and yes, it looks like we may be at the end of the boom (then again, it's looked like that for 10+ years now, and before that we had 1980, 1972, the cold war, 40-48, 30-40, 14-18, "revolutionary" Europe, and so on and so forth, and all of those look to me much, much worse than our current situation. So to some extent I feel inclined to say to people complaining about the economy "big fucking whoop". But it certainly is getting a little bit worse. On the other hand today, I can name 50+ things that could easily resurrect economic growth, and only one of them needs to happen. We could discover a useful fusion principle, we could find a way to mine plate-edge methane gas, we could find a way to produce really cheap solar panels (we're not too far from making that happen, actually), we could ... If you ask me "what could anyone have done to avoid what's coming" in 1938 or 1912, I'd have said "other than changing the religion/ideology of a great many people overnight, nothing can be done". Most societies never even tried to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. Certainly the Ottoman empire, for example, "deserved" what was coming to it. So did the kingdom of France. So did ... Most of these civilizations had people working in them that had at least the seeds of a solution to their problems, and, generally speaking, they killed those people. I'm pretty confident in saying that we are currently not doing that.

Anyway, I may be rambling a bit here. My question is simple : what is the way out of the current conundrum ? If history is a guide, the way out is simply a huge war, a new superpower, and a new dollar, and more capitalism. That's what happened to Spain, Britain, Portugal, ... and that's what fixed their versions of financial industry stupidities. I will agree that it looks like the US is getting buried in financial industry stupidities as well, but ... In history two economic systems have lasted really long times : slavery, and capitalism. The choice seems obvious to me.

[1] I say sadly out of nostalgia. But having read stories from the Roman empire, medieval China, from the Colonies, from the Ottoman empire (I talked to the grandfather of an Armenian immigrant. That was enlightening, especially the parts about the supposed "tolerance" of the Ottoman empire. By that standard Hitler was a saint), stories from 19th century Europe (hell, my granddad actually told me some stories his dad told him about what life was like in France between the revolution and WWI), I'd say it is a very good thing indeed that you can't resurrect societies.