Is there anything better than capitalism?

Customer frauds, price rigging, bad debts in government banks or cooked up balance sheets are all evidence of failure of "arms-length capitalism", wrote VA Nageswaran. "Market economy and private sector capitalism were believed to be different from top-down government-led economy. There were supposed to be automatic checks and balances in the former. But, in practice, both have begun to converge towards non-accountability." "Shareholders do not have long-term horizon and hence, are not interested in corporate actions that pay off in the long term." Politicians have to win elections and so their horizon is limited by the electoral cycle. Although initially it brought company CEOs under some discipline, the biggest problem with today's companies is the principle of "creating shareholder value", wrote J Nocera. It is the reason companies take on too much debt and perform feats of useless -- but stock-price enhancing -- financial engineering." "When shareholders matter more than employees or customers or communities, some people do very well, but the purpose of a corporation becomes warped and society loses." Communism fell with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and confidence in capitalism was eroded with the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, wrote N Ramachandran. "Both systems created a disadvantaged class of citizens..." Some states have adopted welfare economics but others have resorted to "inclusive capitalism" in which there is some "role for the private sector in holding out a helping hand to disadvantaged sections but with dollops of paternalism and nationalism thrown in by the state in an unscripted manner". As in India where we have "Aadhaar card to live, die and everything in between, bank accounts forced down the channel, formal overreach by income tax officials (the informal reach continues), search without probable cause by local police..." The Company Social Responsibility Act by the previous government forces companies to spend 2% of profits on social projects. In today's world, technology has made the State into an all powerful God with detailed information about every citizen, while enacting various laws hide its own activities, wrote D Pattanaik. While human beings are irrational markets are supposed to be rational, where prices reflect fundamentals, but "noise traders", acting in a herd, can push prices above or below fundamentals, wrote Prof N Smith. India's local government system, the panchayats, have been very successful in electing women and lower castes but have failed to deliver vital services to the poor, wrote Prof S Rajagopalan. Inclusive capitalism has resulted in 10% capitalism where the top 10% have all the wealth, while the rest are struggling to survive, wrote M Chakravarty. Trust politics to make things worse.