What we fail to recognize is that capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. Markets need money to circulate, while capitalism sees it as a commodity to mine from society and the economy. Basically nature is cyclical and circular, while people are linear and goal oriented, so we see it as signal to extract and store.
Even Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet one is dynamic, while the other is static. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. Mix them up and the system breaks down.
So ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing the excess are required.
Since the asset is backed by a debt, storing the asset requires generating debt. The more this happens, the stonger the vortex becomes, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. The Ancients devised debt jubilees to reset this, but we lack even that degree of perspective.
Government has also been coerced into being debtor of last resort. The capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The wars are just an oveflow. Which explains how they can be so monumentally inept, but no one is held to account, as would happen in any normal, historical situation, where the military was strategically necessary for survival and not a slush fund.
The federal debt got started with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then WW2 put the military at the front of the line and there was no turning it off. Eisenhower recognized the problem, but everyone since has been pulled into the swamp.
Effectively it has become a societal autoimmune disorder.
Eventually inflation will destroy the dollar, as capitalism has consumed the economy that gave it purpose. Then the states will have to start issuing their own currencies and the break up begins.
In an ideal world, we would recognize there isn't the investment potential for everyone to individually save what is necessary for a stable society, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the commons could be resurrected and updated, but that would require an extreme dislocation of our individualistic ethos, since a functioning commons requires responsibility to come first and rights to come as a reward, but in this society, everyone has rights and no one wants to be held responsible.
The irony of our individualism is the resulting atomized society is more easily controlled by institutional forces and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Almost like it was intended that way, but that's a longer story.
So the likely result is, after the warlords, cartels and gangs fight it out, we fall back into the rut of oligarchy, institutionalized as monarchy, for a few more centuries, or millennia.
