Richard Posner has had a long and distinguished career.  After his confusing and disjointed article in today's Wall Street Journal, I recommend that he spend more time on his fishing and less time on writing.

Capitalism is about (a) the sanctity of private contracts and (b) safeguarding by private and public means honest, transparent, and liquid markets for those contracts, and (c) the hypothesis that such markets will generally do a pretty darn good job at price discovery.

Another observation of most capitalists is that the government makes a pretty bad counter-party.  Why?  Because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, government actors have a pretty big incentive to lie when they can.   Tough to have an honest, transparent market when the rules don't apply to one of the actors.  Second, government regulators, however well intentioned, operate under a landslide of well-documented cognitive fallacies.

So, what about the Crisis of '08 represented a "Failure of Capitalism?"   The $2T of falsely (arguably fraudulently) labeled securities (contracts) at the heart of crisis were labelled by 3 government monopoly licensees.   Over half the market of these fraudulently labeled securities was made by hyper-levered government sponsored entities (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).  Arguably, the insurance products that backed these synthetic securities were the product of capitalist, albeit highly regulated, enterprises.   But without the implied government guarantees, would these contracts have been written?

If capitalists made one incorrect assumption in this process, it was that the government would be a reliable counter-party.  But when the GSEs abruptly pulled out of the sub-prime synthetics markets after the accounting scandals of 2004-2005, this proved to be false hope.  The resulting collapse in the secondary market and frozen liquidity situation precipitated the crisis we know all too well now.

But this was a failure of cronyism, not capitalism.  Perhaps some time with this will reorient you.