Well, you know where I stand on this. But I don't reject the capitalist system inherently--and, if "social democracy" is in your list of acceptables, then neither do you.
You're right about Greece, and the EU's common currency and lack of central power may be proving itself infeasible as events in that country and a few others play out. Greece can only be assigned some of the blame for its present situation.
We ought to implement population control before cutting into people's standards of living. But before we do that we need to reconnect privileged people to the realities of said standards of living. Americans don't want to hear "population control" or "mandatory conservation," because their personal lives do not glimpse the pressures of environmental pollution and resource depletion. People are spoiled.
The Earth's environment will probably support considerably more humans than there are at present, especially given the curve of innovations, but the decreasing availability of some commodities is going to force changes in how we do things. Then again, that's nothing new to human societies.
I expect that if some kind of uncoordinated mass population contraction occurs (i.e., a catastrophe), it will be human guns primarily to blame. But it also probably won't be in places like the United States, where population growth is small and stable. We also happen not to be physically connected to Eurasia, which is a very good thing.
India looks like the weak link, with its intractable corruption, lack of national honor, strong cultural cynicism, and terrible scarcity of vital resources. I expect the Indians to precede the rest of us in being forced to take drastic action to avert an implosion. And, by the same token, so long as Indians are not dying off by the millions, the phantom menace of global population die-offs will remain intangible.
The EU needs a central government; this crisis may lay the groundwork for exactly that, but somehow I doubt that the Europeans are truly ready yet to put aside centuries-old cultural xenophobiae. America was successful in part because we bypassed all of that by starting with a unified federal republic and fighting a single decisive war to put down any moves toward deunification. If the EU does not centralize, I have doubts that it will remain a viable political entity. Given how the Scottish and the Irish are still going on about the English, for example, I am reluctant to say that people will make the right choice.
Another element of the problem is that mainstream liberalism is so frakked up at the moment, and that includes European-style leftism. The global left is very neurotic right now, having chosen multiculturalism and noninterference over social integration and enforced justice. EU voters in the Netherlands and France rejected the EU charter a few years ago, in large part because it was ridiculously abstruse, overworked, and lacking in the sort of iconic clarity around which bedrock works of sociopolitical identity are forged.
I am a proponent of reducing complexity in our social institutions. We need to do this in order for progress to remain viable. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in our legal and financial establishments, which have rendered themselves totally inaccessible to laypeople and must be simplified into straightforward, functional systems of general principles codified in plain English (or whatever language) whenever practical.
It is that same overcomplexity which doomed the EU charter of a few years back, and continues to threaten the EU today in the form of half-assed integration which inevitably leaves the weak states even more screwed than they would otherwise be.
The Irish make an interesting case. They bowed to international pressures to assume huge debts in exchange for a bailout to protect them from going into default. The Irish bear an irrefutable share of the blame for their irresponsible practices during a long-dreamed-for economic boom, but much of the Irish bubble was the result of economic currents that had nothing to do with Ireland. Essentially the Irish contracted a bug--an economic virus--to which they were particularly susceptible due to their (European-style) liberal economic policies. The bug itself wasn't their fault, and now they're being lent money by some of the people whose fault it is, and forced to impose austerity at home.
A lot of this would be corrected if countries would take longer views of economic development. Capitalism is like a nuclear fission reactor, and governments are the control rods and cooling systems. It never makes sense to generate huge amounts of energy, far in excess of the system's capacity, in a very short period of time--even though there will be a brief period of stellar economic efficiency. Contrary to the views of conservatives, it is private greed and governmental corruption in abetting that greed--and not elaborate governmental controls themselves--which precipitate most economic crises. When countries plan ahead, short-term thinking loses credibility and economies prosper (over the long term) in the slow and steady kind of way that avoids meltdowns.
We'll see about whether life in developed countries becomes dangerous due to global resource competition and environmental changes. I have my doubts. The American system is more robust than it seems, as evidenced by the near-barbaric state of primitiveness in which many individuals persist without the country regressing to a state of medievalism. With sufficient public support and political courage, I suspect many sweeping reforms would be institutionally easier to implement than the doomsayers claim. What's lacking is the aforementioned public support and political courage. Today's Democrats clearly don't have it. Will tomorrow's, or do we need a third party?
