Thanks for the article, we seem to have forgotten that "companies are in business to maximise their profit, in a socially acceptable manner" and we elect governments to "legislate what is socially acceptable". Our governments seems to have forgotten who it represents.

Steve Keen of OzDebtWatch http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ says that markets don't tend to equilibrium, if they are left untended they will get further and further out of balance. Ross Gittins has not published anything since 8th of December http://business.smh.com.au/business/its-not-inflation-that-did-us-in-its-the-borrowing-20081207-6t9j.html when he agreed with Steve Keen.

I know that I would have been better served by a national superannuation scheme rather than our current employer based super schemes which encourage the sacking of long time workers with large pension entitlements and unattractiveness of mature workers who put a higher strain on the super scheme than workers under 35. I would love to be retiring onto the McDonalds Super Scheme - how many 15 year olds will remember they have money stashed there?

The super funds have a vested interest in not updating contributors records. When a contributor changes address the correspondence keeps going to the old address, that way the fund doesn't have to tell the Tax Office that they have a lost contributor so they can keep the funds.

George Bush is determined to promulgate small government, which Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine as contracting out government functions on a time and materials plus margin basis with no accountability or auditability. Effectively Halliburton and Blackwater have a license to print money. george Bush is spending his last 60 days in office looking after his mates overturning the 60 year old ban on guns in national parks, overturning regulations that make oil companies pay for environmental spills etc

A good call about the party apparatchiks' mealy-mothed rhetoric. "Help! 'Extreme capitalism' just took my country while I wasn't looking!" Yep, they've been up to their fat necks in "extreme capitalism", with selling public assets, whoring the state to their posh school mates, joining the debt train like it was an amusement park ride, all the while charging punters for everything conceivable. Time that they stared down some serious time in one of their privately run jails.

I counter one point: the presumed "evolution" of capitalism and its supposed certain continuation in just another form. The bail-outs, the ETS scams and the oligarchs' consolidation into fewer entities now point towards fascist and feudal forms of political misconduct. That may seem to the writer to be splitting hairs: "capitalism" of similar sorts was always part of fascism's sick project. But avoidance of the main trend would seem to be missing the direst and most apparent implications of this cascading debt-led meltdown.

mil-observer,

Mossolini was the Head of Government, the Head of the Party and Head of Corporations. Fascism is one facet of National Socialism (Corporate Socialism). If a strong democracy, by The People and with small Government, were to evolve in 200 years in the future, it would be interesting to know their views, on how and why, so many of our contemporaries deluded themselves.

Wrong this system has only been of benefit to the ruling class of society?,now instead of of giving a long singsong about its pros and cons,take a good look at South Africa,a country with vast resources,now in decay under a capitilistic control for as long as I can remember,having been there for most of my life and have seen how this system only worked one way,and that was the white way?.Ja baas?,and now everyone both white and none white are the victims,so I do not accept this crap of it being all the above writer claims it to be

This article could have been titled: "Capitalism, like anything else, has a limit." The author is correct to say that the expectations of people in the market are unsustainable.

Just like a pyramid scheme, the people who get the most of the system are the ones who set it up and convince others to get on board. There comes a time when capitalism changes from being the noble aspiration of upbuilding society to essentially a con game. When this happens, capitalism needs to adjust to throw off the scamsters and parasites and regroup around true wealth-creating operations. If it can't, it will die completely.

mil-observer, you make a good point about governments whoring state assets to their mates in industry. A Government building in the ACT was sold to a private super scheme by the Howard Government for $150 million and then leased back to the tenant at $13 million a year rent increasing at 3% or the rate of inflation, whichever was GREATER, for the next 20 years. It doesn't take much to work out that the new owner will make at least $120 million in 20 years for just having the asset in its portfolio. What's worse, these terms were endorsed by the Government of the day. What a rip-off of taxpayers' money! As someone at the time said, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.