[A]s things now stand, the case that capitalism will make the world - not just the West - materially better off has simply not been convincingly demo… - Linda McQuaig

Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity - at least as a deliberate method of economic organization.... The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity.

All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't.

"Short-term inequality remains a problem," writes [right-wing scholar Dinesh] D'Souza... "but is it a problem we can live with?" …After searching his soul for a few seconds, he apparently concludes that we can live with it. Of course, inequality always feels like less of a problem to those who don't live in corrugated shacks, which is why sales of D'Souza's book have probably been brisker in Manhattan than in, say, Addis Ababa or Khartoum.