The reaction time of capitalism to deal with a problem is dependent upon a lot of factors you're assuming will be in place. Take your example. What if waste of water is so normal/commonplace that during an unusually prolonged drought measures to protect crops are unsuccessful? The drought leads to total crop failure and then to widespread famine. Water is diverted to agriculture too late. A lot of people die of starvation. A lot of children develop lasting physical problems due to malnutrition. There's no time to make tough choices, you just have to ride out the results of the shortsightedness baked into unregulated capitalism 'working it's wonders'. Food prices may eventually recover, but lasting damage has been done - and done needlessly.
In that situation, its tough to point to any system that would react fast enough because you cant predict the future. I agree, we would be screwed, and sometimes we just have to ride through the cycle. But, the alternative might be to react prematurely from a wild ass guess about the future, make a bunch of sweeping changes and hope your prediction comes true. Meanwhile there could be wake of destruction in production or industry or jobs that were supporting families.
I completely agree. Civilized rich societies should have further supports for making sure that people get to live indoors and eat food.
I agree, but I'm not sure we agree on a solution about who should be responsible tp make sure that people live indoors and eat food.
Really.... If we wanted to solve some of the problems that we face, we could just stop supporting the industries that are doing the damage. We don't really need to buy cars, or phones, or washing machines, or modern houses, or large buildings, or bridges, or paved roads, or computers, or anything that doesn't represent basic food, water, or shelter. But we don't advocate that people change their habits, instead we complain that these companies keep making and selling stuff that we all want so badly. I mean really how dare they keep providing the stuff we all keep paying for... lol : )