BBC Radio 4 carried a piece on 3 May covering Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder jamboree in Omaha, NE. It included an interesting interview with the sage himself, Warren Buffet. He is clearly a likeable, intelligent, and conscientious man whom one should respect. Inevitably, he was asked about the financial crisis and his view of the prospects. He was wise enough to say that neither he nor anyone else could predict when or by how much the economy might start to grow again. But he expressed two sentiments - and I think they are sentiments - about capitalism, specifically free-market capitalism, that are often heard and rarely challenged. They are these: (1) capitalism has provided a tremendous increase in living standards since WW2; and (2) the capitalist system will move forward into a new phase of growth.
There is no available proof or disproof for statement (1). Had some clearly different system whose aim was also to increase wealth done better or worse, we might be in a position to judge. The disaster of communism is no evidence that capitalism did this, because communism was not primarily intended to increase wealth measured with money. We don't know whether capitalism did a good job but believe it did for the simple, circular reason that that's what capitalism is for. We should also ask how far the enrichment of the US and Europe might have been at the expense of other people in the world and of the world's own natural resources. It is not self-evident that the solution to world poverty and inequality is capitalism in more countries and more capitalism in one country. I don't know that the statement is false, only that it is an article of faith rather than demonstration.
Statement (2) is more interesting. It offers a notion of progress, a hope that the future will be better than the past. Visions of a brighter future, particularly as a relief from present misery, are common to many ideologies and religions and this may be such a statement of faith. But if it's really a statement about the economic system as such, a prediction of long-run growth, then (a) it contradicts the (true) statement that economic outcomes are not predictable; (b) it expresses the political position that forever increasing wealth is the right objective for society; (c) it says that the human and social costs of the downturn - which must be ascribed to capitalism if the upturn is - are worth paying, so instrumentalising people; and finally (d) by reifying capitalism, it reinforces the idea that the capitalist market is objectively given. It also, of course, ignores what happens to those outside the charmed circle.
The need to question what we really mean by and want from capitalism is far from new, but it has certainly been put into sharper focus by the current economic troubles. Capitalism is part of the political system and can be changed. But that means the politics have to change too.