The Probelm With Capitalism

[Silent3]

34. You're listing a lot of acts of aggression and greed

No matter how much you associate those things with capitalism, they aren't capitalism. They can certainly help greedy capitalists get rich, but they aren't in and of themselves capitalism. Aggression and greed have a long and colorful history from thousands of years before Adam Smith was born.

Here are the basic conditions I'm talking about:

1) A relatively broad concept of personal property. This exists in many cultures, particular anything agrarian or industrial. Less so in hunter-gatherer societies perhaps, but even those societies aren't always completely devoid of the idea.

If you started telling people it was illegal to own personal property, I think you'd find yourself very unpopular. Even ruling out certain categories of personal property like land and buildings and machines and tools would be highly unpopular.

2) A willingness and ability among the population to trade property or labor for other property or labor.

Again, try to put significant restrictions on who can buy what from whom, who can work for or hire another person, and you'll have an unpopular outcome that would require oppressive means to enforce.

Simply combine the conditions where both 1 and 2 exist, et voilà, you have markets and you have the means of production.

Capitalism of some form simply happens given these circumstances. The supercharging of capitalism takes a bit more work, like creating monetary policy, banking systems, stock markets, the concept of incorporation, etc.

What annoys me about the way so many people talk about capitalism is they talk about it not only as a system, but as an imposed system, as if a bunch of mustache-twirling fiends gathered together in smoke-filled rooms to create and impose capitalism on everyone else.

I see capitalism much more as a natural outcome of common conditions. Given those conditions, capitalism is simply what happens unless you specifically and consciously create rules that severely limit what people can own and what people can do.

This said, I am certainly in favor of many laws to curb the excesses of capitalism, but there's a whole lot that can be done to curb those excesses which is popular and fair and not gratuitously intrusive, like environmental regulation, workplace safety standards, minimum wage, etc.