11/02/2011 PERMALINK
To determine just how close to the abyss the world's economy really is, don't look at what is happening in Greece, look at what is happening in Japan. Look to the fact that despite Japan's de facto state of bankrupt, with national debt exceeding 250% of their GDP, an amount far too large to ever be legitimately repaid. So many investors are still converting their dollar holdings into yen, that Japan felt forced to add a stunning half trillion dollar to their ruinous debt load in the last couple of weeks.  Taking huge losses buying dollars with newly borrowed yen, to force down the value of the yen.  Their fear is that the yen's appreciation against the dollar is making Japanese goods so pricey, the world can't afford to buy them.  
When the world's investors so badly want out of the world's reserve currency. That they are this eager to trade it for the the currency of a debt basket-case like Japan.  Then you can be sure that we are perilously close to point where a full scale dump the dollar run can breaking out.  A run that will take down the world's economic system.  Because it is based on the fatally flawed, fiat money/credit expansion meme, this had to happen one day.  Central bankers are no more competent at running an economy than were central planning  apparatchiks of the old Soviet Politburos.  To avoid economic and social collapse, the power to make economic decisions needs to be in widely dispersed.  Just like Communism, Representative Democracy spawns power elites, which use their power to shift away from free market capitalism and create a system of Crony Capitalism, to favor themselves.   
In order to stay healthy, societies must continue to foster the creation of new utility (as economists call useful products and services).  But under Crony Capitalism, as under Communism, the new always gets repressed.  Because it threatens the cash flow or power base of members of the power elite, who control all the existing utility.  Instead of favoring new over existing utility, the incentives get turned around to restrict the new in favor of the old. Causing the system to slip into stagnation and ultimately collapse.
True direct democracy and true free markets, each much more achievable today thanks to the internet, have the power to inhibit the concentration of power and wealth in too few hands. These memes make the formation of the parasitic power elites that bring on the collapse of civilizations much more difficult.