Capitalists today worship what they like to call “Natural Market Forces.” Problem is, those “forces” amount to Greed, not Virtue. In other words the Capitalist system as conceived today is predicated on the concept that:
if people act in accordance with greed,
then they will make decisions that are beneficial to the system.
This principle obviously makes no sense at all, given that the force of greed causes an individual to act in their own self interest, over the interest of the group as a whole. So it should come as no surprise that Capitalism (based on competition, as it is today) is self-destructive and unstable, and rewards players (often quite substantially) at random rather than in accordance with merit.
So it should come as no surprise when such a system sustains catastrophic failure: it is designed to do precisely that – to fail.
That is not to say that Capitalism itself is bad; what is at fault is the insane notion that competition will give us what we want. What we need to realize is that the correct “market force” is cooperation, not competition; and that the perceived benefits of competition are, in fact illusory.
What do consumers want? Low prices, quality, service. Variety – an array of choices. True, competition superficially offers these things – for a while. But since the system naturally destabilizes into a monopoly, as it is designed to do, these benefits evaporate.
The solution is to cultivate a societal value based, not on competition, but on cooperation. On rewarding those who genuinely benefit the whole.
