In 1958, Chairman Mao implemented the Great Leap Forward - a scheme that would advance China's economy so quickly that by 1988, it would be as large and powerful as that of the United States. The Great Leap Forward abolished private property, putting tools, food, buildings - everything that kept China running and fed - into the hands of collectives. Each collective was asked to produce everything it needed - not just its own food and clothing, but the means of production themselves. They had to smelt their own metals to create steel for tractors and building. And since the people were largely farmers or soldiers rather than metal workers or builders, the products of their labors were often unusable.

But there was a goal. China's economy was going to soar! Reality was inconvenient, and those who insisted on pointing it out were denounced as bourgeois reactionaries and put in prison. While millions of people starved to death across China, party leaders reported record harvests. There are reports that when Mao toured the provinces to review the success of his program, party leaders had workers pull up rice from fields Mao had just passed, run ahead, and stick them into the ground in an empty field that Mao was just about to pass. The sad part is that rice plants thusly treated don't live, so ruses like this cost many families what little grain they had.

It is estimated that 20 million people died of starvation in the years between 1959 and 1962. In 1960, only two years after the inception of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was forced to step down in disgrace and it was abandoned. Communism was disgraced largely because of Mao's follies and its reputation as a viable economic system has never recovered.

Please. Tell me that this sounds familiar. Tell me that you already see where I'm going with this.

The concept of buying stock in a company originated with the Romans, but really got going in the Middle Ages. It gave business owners a way to raise money and share risk, and gave those with a little spare cash the chance at more spare cash. For a very long time, buying and selling stock was the provenance of the super rich - royalty and merchant princes owned shares of trading vessels and exploratory expeditions and got even more obscenely rich.

When companies issued stock, they were able to sell on the very attractive promise of future riches. But customers also understood the very real risks. Ships went missing at sea, were taken by pirates, or were run aground by the exotic illnesses the New World offered. It was a gamble, and everyone knew it.

Remnants of that system can be found in the pages of the documents filed with every IPO. There's a section called "Risk Factors." Ideally, it talks about all of the ways that the company issuing the stock could possibly go down the tubes. But nobody reads that section. In fact, there are those who live their lives in denial that the Risk Factors section and its contents even exist. They are large-scale shareholders.

In the "Greed Is Good" 1980s, this class of shareholders was at the root of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts where one company acquired another by buying up most of its stock. The problem is that once the dust settles, the acquiring company is saddled with the debt it took on - debt backed by shareholders with expectations of rising value. Large-scale shareholders vote with their money. If they don't believe a company is doing what it should to make money for them, they sell their shares, driving the value down.

Investors like billionaire Carl Icahn, who buys large interests in companies and then proceeds to bully them about their business practices until they capitulate to his demands (not all of which are successful) have changed the equation. Icahn flogs CEOs and boards to fulfill his ever-more-greedy demands, creating a system where businesses are no longer run for the benefit of consumers, but solely for the satisfaction of shareholders. They take return on investment not as a bonus, but as a guarantee.

This demand for profit, regardless of market realities, has led to the kind of relaxation of rules that allowed men like Bernard Madoff to go without scrutiny for so long. Relaxation that allowed companies to take individual bad loans and turn them into bundles of good loans that were then sold on to large investment conglomerates. The demand for profit has led directly to the near-collapse of the American banking system, the entire collapse of American credit, and the depression (let's call it what it is) that we're in.

Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward ran aground after only two years, but it took several more years for the repercussions to play themselves out. Mao's vision of a China that was America's economic equal did happen, but it happened twenty years later and under a much changed economic system than Mao envisioned.

American laissez-faire capitalism is like a kind of slow-motion Maoist communism. It is just as inexorably running aground, with Carl Icahn and his ilk at the helm, calling down to the engine room for more steam.