Capitalism has been accused of ‘causing’ or being responsible for the current financial collapse yet such criticism is entirely misguided.
Capitalism is defined as the private ownership of the means of production.
Yet if one examines the “cause” of the collapse, one will conclude that executives (and directors) of large public corporations have made astoundingly poor decisions (while enriching themselves in the process). These decisions have been made without referral to the corporation’s owners (shareholders) using those owners’ funds to pay for poor strategies and their equity as the risk capital to underpin them.
In other words, true Capitalism has been hijacked by the servants of the Capitalist system – namely its directors and executives.
The ONLY way to remedy this situation is for shareholders to insist that corporations become accountable to their shareholders, and the only way to do that is to establish shareholder metrics (i.e. quantitatively defined outcomes) and align the corporation to the achievement of those metrics; and not the outcomes that executives concoct to further their professional careers.