Mimic scarcity

The present day industrial elites insist on our society's operating under the rule of the free market even though we are already a mature economy and the free market only works well during the growth phase of an economy, when it is young and still being shaped by the motivations of wide-spread scarcity. 

When the economy matures so that the free market is no longer able to deliver that growth and so when the free market fails to function properly the industrial elites endeavor to marshal government intervention to promote policies that mimic scarcity, policies that will simulate growth so that the society can justify to itself for a little while longer its decision to govern itself under a free market regime. 

WWII brought the world out of the Great Depression and then generated enough investment demand to keep the developed world's economies humming along for at least another fifteen years. The world went through an interim, lull period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. Then peak oil hit and the only way to sustain the simulation of demand was by opening China. The simultaneous shortfall in investment demand in the mature economies was offset by the completely artificial stimulation of consumer demand in those mature economies through the pumping of monetary policy to create a world-wide asset bubble. Now we are nationalizing the debt losses without clawing back the wealth from the perpetrators of the massive simulations of growth.