Wait a hundred years for a collapse, and then avert it

John Kay writes of the financial crisis of 2008,

The political left offered no diagnosis or new ideas, and it gained no electoral advantage. Instead, across Europe, the parties that had waited a century for capitalism to collapse under its own contradictions congratulated themselves that such collapse had been averted by the injection of incredible amounts—trillions of dollars—of taxpayer funds into the banking system.

in Prospect, Issue 186, August 2011.

A salutary lesson pithily expressed, don't you think?