But Slasher, Capitalism did NOT exist in 1945-70s as you state.

You are correct, exchange rates were fixed and in many countries citizens were not allowed to own gold. That is not capitalism.

Governments had very strict import and export controls for restraint of trade reasons; you could not import a large aircraft into this country without government permission to protect the Ansett/TAA duopoly. Rail had government protection from the trucking industry. Capitalism?

Farm produce had (and has still in many cases) to be sold through monopoly marketing boards. That is not capitalism. Neither are the huge EU and US agricultural subsidies – then and now – any part of capitalism.

Labour is permitted to organise and bargain in a monopoly manner but business is not permitted to do so. Capitalism? Nope.

Government controls traditional media ownership to restrict normal business transactions and in the case of TV to preclude entry of new players – not capitalism.

Private health facilities exist in Australia (and US, UK) but do not flourish because of government run hospitals BUT as recent events particularly in NSW show, the government system is not coping. Doctors, food and drug suppliers not paid for six weeks? No morphine in a major base hospital? No anaesthetist available outside business hours at a major hospital hundreds of miles from an alternative? Illegal to insure for medical disaster (IE a bill over $5000 say) to compel people to be “community rated”. Not capitalism and all contributing to particularly Kruddy health services. Health administrations have lots of money – but not to provide services; look at the offices in your state.

Capitalism would ensure a viable electricity grid; more frequent failures are certain in future as governments limit investment returns and in NSW, maintain government ownership of generation – good luck when both fail and people die!

No, CAPITALISM has not failed; it has not been tried yet. GOVERNMENT has failed. The remedy is not more government. Businesses have to be efficient to survive; government acts without competition, no incentive to be efficient, plenty of scope for corruption. QED.

We are cerrtainly living under socialism at the momment. Government keeps itself employed: it meddles with the economy, and hence, when the economy does turn sour, it uses this as a pretext to intervene in the economy yet *again*. Personally, I think that we should return to 1. "free banking" (i.e. abolish central banking altogether, and have banks print their own currencies) and 2. abolish all taxes (or certainly most taxes) and have a flat, simple reasonable tax on the non-value added price of land (i.e. don't tax wages and profits, tax rents). The former means interest rates are not set too low, the latter means price of land becomes sustainable quenching speculation. The latter also means government, small government, when it builds infrastructure, can recycle the windfalls back into the Treasury to build more infrastructure. Alas, both are pipe dreams and hence the boom bust cycle shall continue forever more until people are educated enough to tackle land speculation (like in Hong Kong) and abolish central banking.

ps free banking may involve a gold standard (my point is a gold standard would be better than the *status quo*)

pps the most stable currency ever was a currency back in land values, known as the pennsylvania pound. This produced inflation of only 3 over the course of a decade, the most price stability ever seen.