No, look at the numbers. Capitalism is like gravity. A fact that applies always and everywhere. Money is a “wild animal”. It can’t be captured or caged. If you put up a fence it just goes elsewhere. Hence real GDP here is negative. There, my FRiend, is the problem. The numbers don’t lie, America is dying. Real value has been traded for a mirage of lies and empty promises. Apple says the equipment to make their products doesn’t even exist here anymore. No one here is motivated to turn things around. Grim future but soon Wile Coyote is gonna look down.
The issue is "institutions" -- large organizations assembled for a purpose. In the beginning, for reasons Adam Smith noted, institutions can provide remarkable productivity at remarkable scale. They are the large-scale source of good things at low prices: food, cars, computer chips, iPhones. When institutions are initiated, they are generally well-matched to the problem and context. Wealth flows from an institution in match.
Stability of a large organization inevitably requires a hierarchical form, which inevitably requires the suppression of individual willpower down the hierarchy and the concentration of power up the hierarchy. Information flow is politicized, so that the powerful, even if they were intelligent, never see the information they need to make rational decisions. Over time, institutions always turn into huge, lumbering dinosaurs. Reflecting the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the environment around the dinosaurs changes incessantly, more rapidly now than in the past. The institution eventually turns into an institution in mismatch.
As Bill Livingston has pointed out, institutions in mismatch are the primary source of societal damage. And all of the major institutions in our society -- apart from a few who thrive on Moore's Law -- are in mismatch with a rapidly evolving context, with no hope of recovery. Large institutions cannot adapt, they can only flail about, damaging all in the vicinitity. Prepare for more damage.
From the wreckage, new institutions will emerge, once again producing benefits on a scale that only capitalism can. But we're not there yet.
Manufacturing equipment can be bought, paid for, and shipped to wherever it needs to be. America's problem is that the people needed to make Apple products don't exist here. But technology is solving even that problem: we're replacing the useless robots now generated by our factory schools with useful robots built in other factories, by robots.
Nowadays a billion dollars invested in physical plant produces a few dozen jobs, the fewer the better.
The fiscal cliff is nothing compared to the societal cliff we're facing.