Capitalism is a superior economic system to socialism, that much is fact. The remanent question is if capitalism is the best system that can exist. For this the answer is not so clear.

Case in point, manufacturing capacity in the United States. Certain products are cheaper to make overseas due to the lower cost of living. Lower cost means higher profit margin, so capitalism says that this is a good thing. One could also argue that it's good for the third-world countries as well, since it brings them business and employment. Of course, a downside for the countries, like China, is that they have few occupational health and safety restrictions, which mean they might be screwing up their environment or workers' health. However, the big downside is for the first-world countries: they lose their manufacturing base. In the U.S., we no longer have the manufacturing capacity that played a huge role in winning World War II. The concern is the capability to wage war if necessary. I'm not talking about skirmishes like Afghanistan and Iraq (which weren't even properly 'wars'), but all-out conflict like WWII. No one should in their right mind would want such a thing to happen, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared for that possibility. To lay bare our buttocks for pillage is foolhardy and irresponsible—unless one enjoys that sort of thing. (That was as sanitized as I could make the metaphor, though it is most certainly appropriate.)

The key issue is short-term gains versus long-term sustainability. Perhaps part of this is a cultural problem, given that the current recession is due to an inability to grasp future consequences. Capitalism doesn't innately provide for a mechanism to deal with such a social problem, and reasonably so, since it is an economic system. Furthermore, overnment intrusions into the free market, namely their association with the money-printing Federal Reserve, insane lending practices with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, collusion with corrupt heads of large corporate interests, etc., means that capitalism hasn't truly been at work in the U.S., so I don't think anyone can definitively say that capitalism was the underlying cause. The primary concern is self-sufficiency of the country as a whole, which should be every country's ultimate priority. In that regard, it seems that the free market doesn't have a way to maintain that state. Should the government be employed to intervene and provide economic incentives to maintain domestic manufacturing? We can point to several aspects in the recession where government meddling was largely responsible, so a desire to avoid government solutions at all costs would be prudent. What, then, is the solution? A sense of social responsibility on the part of business leaders? Certainly that won't spring into being from nothingness. As citizens we need to consider solutions to this apparently social problem.