I say the doom has a very shiny gold lining.
It's necessary, imho.
You have progress, or you don't have progress. With progress comes a lot of advancements that greatly challenges, and changes, society. The good will help offset the early bad moments, and will also help encourage further progress.
Humanism steps in, however, and demands certain regulations to help offset problems. Often, these problems are directly related to an overworked/underrepresented work group, a specific working class if you will. The regulations help bring this group to the forefront, and more regulations start cropping up to prop up the newly created underrepresented group.
Some governments will have better first cracks at managing issues as they crop up, and some even get it right the first time. So many factors play into how any little thing in the developed world will impact everything else in those developed countries, and more so what the impact will be world wide.
It doesn't truly matter how "advanced" a country or society is, it is merely the growth and progress. Look to Rome and other ancient civilizations, progress and forward thinking help establish further positive trends, but eventually shit hits the fan for some reason.
History repeats itself too. Up, down, up, down, up, up, up, down, up, down, down, up...
Sometimes the lessons weren't heeded, or sometimes it's just an entirely new issue and the management of the crisis wasn't careful enough.
The U.S. will always be a rather unique entry into the chapters of history, and hopefully historians take into account all of the unique factors.
It is a country focused on sweeping positive trends in progress of all types, which in land area is historically the only country to do well enough.
Land area also presents an important factor, as space and property is a cherished commodity. Should it be? That's for you extremists to debate, I for one enjoy it.
But regardless, all problems correct themselves. That's ultimately the main logic for laissez faire, and with a little more research and more careful application of what I call "the facts of humanism", lends credence to the importance of minor regulation that above all should only encourage rabid competition, not deter it.
On the note of economic issues and regulation and our goals/strategies to avoid failure - let things fail. In the end, most swiftly-enacted regulation to deter hard times merely slows the onset of "hard times" and lengthens that period a great deal. Nobody in a current generation wants to take on the bad times to get it over with, so that the future generations can avoid it. Rather, we seem, perhaps unknowingly, to prefer pushing hard times off as far as we can, so that we may continue to enjoy everything now as it is at the moment. As you can imagine, this means it's going to be fucking miserable. It's not only economic issues, but basically all major society-wide issues, some even global.
And it is with that, after I have perhaps rambled a little incoherently, that I want to make a short point:
failure is our closest yet most annoying friend. Instead of trying to push off failure, we need to embrace it. THAT, is ultimately what being human means. We have the social capability to learn from failure, but we don't learn when we constantly make little tweaks that spread the failure out over a vast period of time, because no single generation truly feels the entirety of the failure. Failure encourages learning, because out of absolute failure comes potentially more applicable knowledge.
And that isn't merely focused to any country, but rather the world population. Grand failure also means a high body count for some reason or another, but it's necessary. It gives room to expand upon the recent history lesson, and perhaps create something better amongst the debris. Something worse might crop up, as people enjoy the seemingly bright and easy road but the turn ahead is masked by an obstacle, versus taking the road that while visible for a great length, is a challenge for what may be a decent portion of the first leg of the journey. It's on governments to create fixes to new problems, it's on the society to judge whether the new corrections are better or worse. If it seems like it doesn't do much now but is paving the way for a more peaceful time, in general it might be good. If it keeps everything the way it is, or making these even more awesome sounding, and promises a better tomorrow, take it with a grain of salt, research and scrutinize the hell out of it, and if it even remotely sounds like it's just going to fuck things up more, do everything in your power to try and reverse the correction and help steer toward a new idea. It may take a few tries, because humans collectively are utterly retarded. We are retarded when we get into herd socialization.
Animals have bad days, we are not different. We are not special, we are not perfect. We'll never have a perfect world, and the sooner people realize that, the better off we'll be. We need to apply logic and rationale and create effective solutions that are within the means of the people.
With progress as a focus (as it must be, no other way around it, and that is a discussion that is an entirely different subject), we'll forever and always continue to make good and bad decisions, because consequences aren't always predictable or worse, sometimes hidden. The best solution is for we, as the citizens of our own home, to do what we can to ensure bad solutions get squashed and good solutions are praised. But good solutions can't always be copied because local conditions can require entirely different solutions that aren't carefully measured in the grab for the peace on the horizon. Again, the easy road versus the hard road.
If we want a more peaceful future for the next generation, this generation has to endure and embrace a load of misery. And even then, nothing is guaranteed because, again, that future generation is still human and still prone to being absolutely retarded.
In short - humans suck.
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