Could anything have saved it?

To throw retrospective light upon the causes of the decline of capitalism, some wrong turnings are discussed. First, law should never have allowed corporations to be ‘natural persons’, separate from their owners, and consequently the vehicle for worldwide tax avoidance. Second, bankers would have to have been denied limited liability if creative energy was to be focused on technological innovation of the kind that generated the early wealth of capitalism. Third, laws to protect information needed to be redrawn so as to benefit genuine innovators instead of being supports to firms that have other types of market power. An aspect of this would be to reverse international agreement which were imposed on poorer countries. This would enable these countries to copy and so learn by doing, which is how Western countries had become rich themselves. The introduction of teams in bureaucracies whose task would be to develop better property laws as an alternative to intervention by the state, could also have helped to slow the decline of capitalism. However, the burden of evidence is that this decline is irreversible, because interest-group politics is now so entrenched.