Several centuries? Then don't you think it's time for a change? You sound like like someone driving a Tin Lizzie saying the car does a perfectly good job getting you where you want to go.
Viewing humankind's questing spirit, there really has to be -- at *some* point -- a more efficient and equitable way of generating and distributing wealth than capitalism, with its manic-depressive cycles and focus on only two human attributes, fear and greed. I remember from college poli sci that the biggest rap against utopian schemes is that they envision fundamentally stagnant societies -- a vision that doesn't conform to history and human nature. However, I think that eternal paeans to the past achievements of capitalism put us *right now* in just such a state of social stasis; in effect they suggest that the current economic order *is* the summit of human perfectibility The phrase that comes to my mind is Orwell's: "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
Judging from history I would think that capitalism is not the last word in social and economic evolution and that the system will change fundamentally in time. Why shouldn't that process start now?
Carl