Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
It requires free markets, and generally provides workers the liberty to own their own labor, and allowing individuals to decide how they spend their time and how they spend their money. There are unfortunately examples where privately owning capital means abridging liberty of the workers. However, for a lot of people ideal capitalism means workers are more free than in other economic systems since they can sell their labor to whoever they please, or use it themselves without interference from external entities like the community or the government. For a lot of people, protecting people against these situations becomes a major role of government in a capitalist society.
Contrasting this liberty and individual choice, many other economic systems including socialism and communism have the community or the central government make these decisions for the individual.
Often, "Capitalism" becomes the catch-all phrase attacking all market failures exclusively. For example, some people talk about feudalism and complain about capitalism, but under feudalism everything belonged to the king, and the king would meter out control of his holdings to nobility, who in turn would meter out control to peasants. By definition the capital was not owned privately since it was owned by the king exclusively.
Capitalism often works very efficiently because individuals know what they want or need better than the state does. Free markets tend to be rooted in pragmatism: For one example, Meta has invested billions of dollars into the metaverse, but people don't want the metaverse so they've just lost that money. If this was a government program, customers would be forced to participate in the metaverse or they'd continue to get money forever, but eventually the private company will run out of money for the program and eventually the capital will be reallocated to something more beneficial.
It's this very pragmatism that can be dangerous at times: Jonathan Swift said markets need to be underpinned by a moral society for this reason. The pragmatic thing is often also horribly evil, such as spending as much as possible to monopolize surface water then raising the prices of water massively. This is another place where even proponents of capitalism often support government intervention, to ensure that market actors aren't taking actions that are profitable but grossly immoral.
In practice, there have been virtually no examples of pure capitalism, so there are many examples throughout history where merchants could trade and individuals could own things despite strong central planning in other ways, but although there are examples from the medieval era onwards, capitalism in the sense we think of it today really started with eras focusing more on liberalism, which started only a few hundred years ago. In addition, capitalism has never been the only economic system on earth at one time, with a number of different economic systems being in play at any one time and that's true today.
This moment reminds me of the mid to late 90s when the religious right and the moral majority as the political bloc were deep in decline. It didn't look like it at the time because they were pushing hard and sometimes succeeding at stuff, but it was the fact that they had to push hard that changed, and that marked a change in trajectory a lot of people didn't recognize at the time.
Women don't know what they actually want consciously, just as men don't. They know what they like when they see it, and sometimes it's not what they expect.
Everyone is going to lose if the society tells kids first that it's not worth finding a spouse, second that it's morally wrong to better yourself to become worthy of being someone's spouse, and third that it's morally wrong to expect someone to become better to become worthy of being your spouse.
There's so many examples of long proven technologies that are being ignored because we need to chase stuff that's perpetually "just 5 more years away"
Electric streetcars are 100 year old technology, and they're basically gone but busses filled with materials mined by african child slaves are the new hotness.
Thankfully my grandfather's story was passed down through the generations, and made it into my book to my son.
Imagine the trauma of not only watching your best friend die right in front of you while you were walking down the street, but watching moment by moment as the free country you fought for melted away one hour at a time.
On November 11th when we're asked to remember, I do remember, and it makes me mad as hell that we betrayed them like that.
The culture has tried to logic us out of our basic human instincts, and as a result there's a deep seated need to build something for the future that's going completely unfulfilled. That's where we end up with all this insane degeneracy, because their biology is screaming that they're screwing up something important and they can't understand what since they're living so completely according to what the culture tells them is logical.
Twitter made up rules in order to keep the son of a former vice president who was found to be likely selling influence safe, but was strangely silent when my personal details were leaked to the press because I anonymously donated to the trucker convoy.
Had establishment press scum emailing me for days. Twitter was totally ok with that. As was the press.
Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not likeAdversary of FediblockAccept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...