Capitalism is the greatest system we know for increasing living standards and spurring innovation. The opening up of Asia to the global economy has lifted 1.5 billion people out of poverty in the last 20 years. There's good reason why large majorities of people in developing countries like Vietnam, China, and Nigeria
express strong support for free market systems.
But capitalism and free markets also have some pretty serious fundamental problems. The biggest is that in the absence of catastrophic disruption, like major wars and famines, wealth
inevitably gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The unprecedented prosperity of the West in the post-war decades was made possible due to the enormous loss of wealth suffered in WW1 and WW2. Labour temporarily had a stronger hand relative to capital, and we saw remarkable widespread prosperity and historically low levels of inequality.
But that state of affairs only lasted about three decades, and since then capital regained its irresistible gravitational power of concentration. Unless we have another catastrophe on that scale that wipes out a huge portion of the world's wealth, we'll eventually see a very small number of people holding most of the world's wealth. It will be impossible to sustain more than the facade of democracy under such conditions.
Now consider automation, and the dawning realisation that the economy of tomorrow will need far less labour than today's economy, and it should be clear that the status quo cannot be sustained much longer. Whether it's a tax on all financial transactions, a tax on machines that put people out of work, or universal basic income, we're going to have to adopt some pretty dramatic measures if we want to stave off severe social unrest.