Colebatch's narrative is cogent and contains many valid points, without question, at least IMHO. And MountainMan certainly kicked off the salient issues, if not the causes.

But . . . democracy works just fine if it takes place within a civil society. Sprinkling the right to vote on the uninterested or worse, those that have lived in a "me" (or "we" when that's just tribalism) society doesn't work, clearly. The examples are too numerous. As for the superiority of democracy - Churchill's quote seems to hold.

China's amazing climb . . . it and India's GDP were equal in '92 when China drew EVEN. China has raced ahead. India's done alright but in comparison has languished. Denizens of the Philippines and South Korea like to compare 50 years ago when they were equal. Singapore's climb is also impressive.

But the climbers invariably used the current trading system to game the system. Korea has certainly been innovative in a few areas, far better than China or Singapore (whose main innovation has been importation of large numbers of skilled gast-arbeiter). There are whole book reviews that collect various books authored by former govt officials all over Asia that plainly state how they gamed the system. (Germany has also been not a little guilty of this with a export driven economy that's very modern and a domestic one that looks rather 19th century.)

So while I agree that there are far too many sacred cows . . . most of the contributors on this thread hail from areas of the world that have been remarkably good at killing those sacred cows over the past several hundred years. The "west" has been nearly antithetical to the "this is the way it was, this is the way it is, this is the way it shall be" that still grasps much of the rest of the world.

And really, if I were a visitor to almost ANYWHERE in the Arab or Asian world 600 years ago and suggested that Europe and it's progeny would go on to dominate the world soon and for at least 500 years - I'd have been laughed or thrown out of any place I'd spoken. After all the Mongols' Venetian spies counseled them to ignore Europe due to it's lack of knowledge, technology and riches. Don't be so sure the game is up. China's gaming via intensive investment looks potentially very rickety and therefore de-stabilizing, at least internally. Singapore struggles with a huge affordability issue for it's own citizens, especially retirees.

Certainly there is a "great convergence" underway globally with western entities and their economies suffering and that's unlikely to be slowed, nevermind reversed, where a western minority had high wages and high productivity relative to the rest for centuries. Martin Wolf has written on this for some time.

The reaction of the 1% may well be sensible self-preservation. A new feudalism does not seem ridiculous given the global trends underway.

Capitalism has built-in instabilities. And it's always relied on a new space to expand into. Now, with the coming online of formerly great powers returning to an importance economically and politically they've not experienced in centuries . . . the new space is . . . severely constrained. We're all just sharing a CLEARLY limited space - Earth, and it's limited resources of clean air, water, and other commodities with a population soaring to 11 billion by centuries' end.

Given the convergence (of wages and productivity) that sacred cow, a man-made system, capitalism, seems very much overdue for a review at least.

Or as Edward Abbey, the father of the American environmental movement and an admittedly blighted soul stated - "capitalism preaches growth for the sake of growth and that is the mantra of the cancer cell."

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