Too Big to Fail?

Editor,

The point that is lost, even in your surprisingly forthright analysis of corporate America's cut-throat style of capitalism ("Too Big to Fail?", 7/20/2008), is that the purpose of any economic system is to sustain the civilization whose material operations it supports. If it fails to do that, then the civilization upon whose existence that economy depends will disappear.

Hyper-individualistic schemes like "free market" fundamentalism, whose prime tactic is to maximize private profit by socializing risk, threaten to kill the goose (civilization) that lays the golden egg (prosperity) -- in this case by eliminating jobs and employing other tactics to concentrate wealth, whose ultimate purpose is to grease the wheels of commerce, in fewer and fewer hands.

The issue finally is not whether the U.S.A.'s creditors will bail this country out but rather whether economic decision-making power in the U.S.A. can be wrested from the corporate entities that are cannibalizing our society and gorging themselves in a feeding frenzy that by definition cannot be sustained.