It is easy to blame the current global financial and economic meltdowns on the actions and excesses of capitalism, but really this is not an accurate picture. True free-market capitalism would not have created the current mess: it is not the result of free markets, but of interference in those markets.
Bubbles in housing, stock-markets, and bond-markets, were all created and accelerated by artificial lowering of interest rates. Housing bubbles have also been encouraged by tax policies that favour buying over renting. In the US, UK and elsewhere, things have been made far worse by the governments guaranteeing and/or subsidising mortgages. And all of the financial bubbles have been blown bigger and bigger by giant central-bank bailouts, authorised and enabled by governments. Such market manipulations are entirely against the spirit of free market capitalism. Unfettered free market capitalism would have allowed the bankrupt institutions to fail, driving the bad debts out of the system. Those who had made bad decisions would have suffered the consequences of their own actions. In fact, if interest rates had been set by free market forces, there would not have been such giant asset bubbles in the first place.
However, capitalism is now an old and dying paradigm. It claims to be based on freedom, but in reality it is based on competition, power, and rigid hierarchical structures of command. In a capitalist system the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The vices of greed, selfishness, and lust for material possessions, produce an advantage in capitalism: in general terms, the more voracious and antisocial you are, then the more rich and powerful you will become. The greediest few take control of everything, and most people become pawns in their power games.
We are now witnessing the end-game of capitalism - the decadent phase, whereby the affluent western countries have become like very spoilt children, accustomed to indulging every perverse whim, and growing fat and inert and inept on the backs of low-paid workers in developing countries like China and India, who toil and sweat to keep the overfed Americans and Europeans awash in a tidal wave of disposable consumer bawbees. We in the west are now too fat and lazy to do anything much ourselves, other than play increasingly twisted tricks on our eastern worker slaves, as we persuade them to lend us all their money so we can keep buying their goods. We no longer produce most of the goods we have become dependent on, and so we earn no means to pay back these loans. The Chinese and Indians are starting to realise this, and in future they will sell their goods to their own people, and in so doing they will progress from being our slaves to enjoying the fruits of capitalism for themselves. In theory.
In practice, there is unlikely to be a functional capitalist system remaining after it hits the concrete wall of global financial collapse, and even if there is, it will then run immediately aground in the sand trap of scarce resources.
This is not such a bad thing. The end result of world-wide capitalism, if it were allowed to reign unfettered by governments, would still be the raping of planet earth - the destruction of the forests, the killing of the soil, the poisoning of the oceans, the depletion of mineral resources, the cheapening of culture, and the subjugation of spirituality by material values. Capitalism is perfectly capable of destroying our quality of life and the ecosystem that we all depend on, and indeed it seems custom-designed to do just that.
So, the destruction of the free-market system by government and financial intervention on a global scale is simply accelerating the process of decay that would have occurred anyway under free market capitalism. The problem with capitalism is not the freedom or otherwise of the markets, but rather it is a problem equally inherent in communism and socialism - the lack of virtue in humanity itself. It is corruption and selfishness, now more endemic than ever in the human race, that dooms us to suffering and self imposed misery. We literally create our own misery.
If we all looked out for each other, instead of looking out for ourselves - and if we all understood that, as spiritual beings, we are all one - then we would all understand the value of virtue. If I hurt my fellow man in order to help myself, then in fact I hurt myself also. If we, as a race, are not honest and caring and loving and giving, then we ourselves will suffer, as we destroy, ultimately, everything we touch. This is the big lesson for us in the current destruction of our old "civilization". We have brought it on ourselves through false values. We have been like a plague of locusts, intent only on feeding ourselves right now, at the expense of having any food left for tomorrow.
Capitalism was always going to eat itself. But it is really ourselves who are doing the eating. It is our loss of the basic virtues of humanity which has led us to embrace such a system. We lost sight of what we are - divine beings incarnated in human bodies, playing games in paradise, at one with the loving embrace of mother nature - and instead we have come to define ourselves in terms of physical appearances and material possessions. We happily call ourselves "consumers" as we eagerly participate in a warped system that is systematically trashing and wasting the resources of our planet at an ever-increasing rate. We allow ourselves to be programmed by our "culture" and "society" to be driven by fear and selfishness, greed and lust, and to be desperate to "get ahead" of our neighbours. By being compliant to such a twisted system, we ourselves exacerbate the problem.
We should not blame capitalism, and we should not blame our governments, and we should not blame our neighbors, nor our fellow citizens in other countries. Instead, we should take full responsibility ourselves, each and every one of us, for the hell that we have created from the paradise that we were given. We have destroyed our garden, and we must rebuild it according to a better methodology - based on love, compassion, co-operation, and sharing - or else we will all perish.