The way I look at it, the point of a market is to convince us to do things we don't want to do that nevertheless other people want us to do. Money is the mecha

The way I look at it, the point of a market is to convince us to do things we don't want to do that nevertheless other people want us to do. Money is the mechanism for this. When you get paid for something, it sweetens the deal, so that you put up with stuff like going in to work 9-5 and dealing with angry customers and writing unit tests. Prices are an information-carrying mechanism: they tell people which activities are in high demand but low supply, and conversely, which activities aren't really worth doing. Bankruptcy and unemployment are the means with which we "prioritize and allocate resources". They are, by definition, when you stop doing what you were doing and start doing something else. So no, I would disagree that "governments are begging for this to happen" - I can't think of a government that's encouraged bankruptcy and unemployment since the 1980s. I view various forms of capital as a way to get over local maxima in economic efficiency. You borrow money or raise funds now so that you can build up tooling and innovations that will let you work more efficiently in the future, and then if you're right, you make lots of profits and can pay back your loans & dividends. If you're wrong, you go bankrupt, your investors take a haircut, and that capital goes back to other more productive activities. Constantly growing debt balances and inflation, however, I view as a way of lying to ourselves. They're basically saying "Well, in the future, things will get better", but when the future arrives and you still don't have profits, shrink the yardstick so things look better. That's exactly what "government action that supports the market" is - it's a way to avoid the failure of enterprises and loss of jobs that the market, on its own, doesn't demand enough to make profitable. Do this over 90 years and you can get some pretty extensive misallocation of capital.