Notice that none of the critics of capitalism have yet established:
1. that capitalism is unsustainable – they think it’s good enough to refer to people who assume it is
2. that capitalism drives population growth – rather than the other way around
3. that resources are, for practical purposes, finite – or why it’s okay to assume Malthus and Ehrlich were right, when they were wrong
4. how adding more taxes, regulations, spending, bureaucracies, police, penalties, magistrates and prisons is going to make capitalism more sustainable
5. how any alternative is going to avoid abolishing economic calculation in the affected field, apart from that made possible by the remaining capitalism
6. how increasing the abolition of economic calculation is going to make capitalism more sustainable
7. how any alternative to capitalism is going to distinguish products that are permissible from those that are not
8. how the regulating authority is going to know all the values that all the people who are subject to it, are trying to achieve by their economic activity?
9. Given that it cannot know that, how the regulating authority is going to avoid critical shortages and surpluses in the all the wrong places – the characteristic of central planning?
10. How is replacing a system based on force and threats ethically better than one not based on force and threats?
11. Why the same problems that beset all attempts to centrally plan society is not going to affect you in any attempt to replace capitalism with government regulation?

There are food shortages now, while the most productive countries in the western world - influenced by your ideological fellow-travellers - are shutting down food production on an unprecedented scale. And you guys still don’t get it, do you?

To persist as if the principles of reason don’t apply to you, as if these things were all just a matter of opinion, as if we can make up any reality we want so long as we give enough arbitrary power to government, is intellectually and morally disgraceful.

It is bad enough being educated but completely ignorant of the refutations of your Marxist balderdash. But even after it is explained to you, you persist in beliefs that are every bit as irrational and superstitious as religious creation myths, only this time the object of reverence is government, rather than the church or God.

If your arguments, or rather assumptions were correct, socialism would have been a wonderful success. Doesn't your curiosity, or humility, prompt you to wonder what if you are wrong?

A complete demolition of all the arguments offered by all the critics of capitalism in this thread is here: http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php&title=1060

Good grief, Herr Mises! Is that the best you can do! He's a 40 years dead fundamentalist who believed, among other things that economic truths are derived from self-evident axioms and cannot be empirically tested [you just have to believe, man]. He elaborated his view in his magnum opus, "Human Action", though he failed to persuade many economists outside the Austrian school he headed. Mises was also a strong proponent of laissez-faire [what a coincidence]; he advocated that the government not intervene anywhere in the economy [go on eh?]. Interestingly, though, even Mises made exceptions to this dogmatic view. For example, he believed military conscription was justified in wartime. He once famously yelled at a conference gathering, "ah, you're all a bunch of socialists!" An earlier incarnation Col/Stern/PH ?

This is ripping fun, Peter Hume,

Capitalism is the anomaly - it is not the normal state of affairs - and eventually as needs must it will be usurped.

Kumar wrote about something termed "dialectical progression": "Basically it recognises that novel and creative developments almost never arise from the further exploitation of existing practices. So it is in nature - so it is in society. The attitudes and institutions that dominate a society at any particular time are the result of a successful adaptation...The environment inevitably changes...when this happens, the currently dominant mode is the least capable of adapting to the new situation, having perfected itself, and exhausted itself in adapting to the old."

*Capitalism is the anomaly - it is not the normal state of affairs*

Not really Poirot. In nature, every creature needs to make a living
somehow. The last time I read up on tribes like the Kung "bushmen"
in SW Africa, women were swopping meat for a bit of sex. The free
market has been around since we existed, even chimps swap one thing
for another.

*But only within the compulsion of being forced into super in the first place*

Well fair enough TBC, some people really are too silly to think of the
future and their old age, how it will be provided for. Simply increasing taxpayers to pay for it, is hardly sustainable. The
present model is quite sustainable.

*and then having the reality of it all being reduced to nothing when the next GFC hits*

Whose super was reduced to nothing? If you think that BHP, the
banks, Woolies and all the rest will be vanished, that is your
right, but it is hardly rational. Those 1.3 trillion $ in assets
are hardly nothing.

*You can run your own fund, but for most people on 'ordinary' wages it is not worth the effort.*

Well there you have it. Most people simply can't be bothered, despite
all that money being in their name and there for their retirement.

*It was turned into privatised pensions through a swap, wage off-sets for super.It is not a 'gift' from happy employers.*

That was 25 years ago and applied only to some workers. Since then
wages have increased by around 20% above inflation, so workers
caught up. The levy is still paid by employers by force of Govt.

None of this however changes the basic fact that today, Australian
workers largely own the means of production, which would make
old Marx turn in his grave.

Poirot instead of citing academic authors channelling Marx, I challenge you to answer the questions or have the intellectual honesty to admit that you can't?