@hawkeye10,
What has been lost ever since Reagan is an understanding that capitalism is useful as a tool to better the interests of the collective, but when the wealth holders are allowed to do what ever they want they will almost always choose to do what is best for them, which is often not which is best for the collective. Capitalism only works when the people though government can keep and eye and and keep a leash on the holders of wealth. What we have now is a government that works more for the corporate class than it does the overall collective, though government leaders will make the appropriate noises for public consumption when they need the votes or when the public confronts them on being in the pocket of the corporate class. The corporate class has also done a good job of brain washing, the worst of it is that they early on corrupted the University so all of our so called experts have been miseducated on the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and of proper use of the markets.
I was hoping that the Great Recession would be a wake up call, that we still had time to enact reforms. Nope, we did not learn a thing. It is now clear that we need to do a full blown depression to get to where we need to be. It should not take long to get one.