Collapse is inevitable.

The political world is divided between left and right. On the one hand we have socialist type governments in France, Venezuela and India which believe in taxing the rich to help the poor not expecting any responsibility from the poor towards society and on the other we have right wing governments in the US and UK where the discussion is about cutting taxes for the rich and cutting " entitlements " for the poor to force them to find work however hard or low paying it maybe. By its very nature leftist policies are unsustainable however tempting they maybe to self serving politicians. Although altruistic by nature human beings are motivated by profits and a sense of fairness so if talented people find that they are not being rewarded for their efforts they stop exerting themselves and those at the bottom stop working because they find it easier to live on benefits from the state than to take on manual labor. The Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba and North Korea are poor and China has embraced capitalism even though the Communist Party still rules. India is a mess of many parties with totally different ideas as to how it should be run. The Congress uses a cynical form of socialism to win elections which only increases corruption, causes inflation and hurts the very poor that they so profess to love. Capitalist countries, on the other hand, are rich and powerful. In these countries talents are allowed to flourish, ideas are rewarded and entrepreneurs can become fabulously rich. The trouble with these countries is that the rich accumulate power and are able to finance their friends into office who, in turn, enact laws that protect the rich while hurting the poor. Since the poor and the middle class vastly outnumber the rich this causes enormous social strain. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was a classical example of crony capitalism. It was caused by deregulation so that financiers were able to game the system and when it collapsed banks were rescued with billions from the government so that bankers still awarded themselves millions in bonuses while the middle class lost their homes to foreclosure. Marie Antoinette's surprise at why the poor did not eat cakes when they had no bread maybe an extreme example of the disconnect between the privileged and the ordinary but Mitt Romney's comment about the 47% and David Cameron's steely austerity while allowing the rich to avoid taxes altogether by adopting phony " non resident " status show the complete lack of understanding of ideas of fairness. As inequality increases a revolution will result as happened in France, Russia and China. On a completely different note, the story going round is that the Pakistani terrorist Kasab was not hanged at all but died of dengue fever. The hanging was staged to cover up the embarrassment. Love conspiracies.