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RE: Know It All: Thinking You Know is Worse Than Not Knowing

in LeoFinance2 years ago

Capitalism doesn't exist. Its a Socialist term invented and used to maintain the fiction that Free Markets are inherently immoral and unjustifiable.

What about the term “capitalism”? Interestingly, although the Industrial Revolution (beginning in the mid-18th century) demonstrated capitalism at work, the term wasn’t coined or used until the mid-19th century. Even Adam Smith (1723–1790)—the father of political economy, first systematic expositor of the workings of free markets, and author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)—did not use the term “capitalism.” The closest he came was to endorse what he called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Likewise, prominent philosophers and economists who issued widely-read treatises in the decades surrounding Smith’s 1776 book (e.g., David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, James Mill, David Ricardo, J.R. McCullough, J.S. Mill) discussed “capital” and “capitalists,” but not “capitalism.”
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Many writers preceded Marx in using the term “capitalism,” and of course, many used it after him. However, it has primarily been used by anti-capitalists. Thus, historically the use of the term “capitalism” has been shaped largely by those who, at best, misunderstood the system or, at worst, understood it but deliberately mischaracterized it in order to attack a straw-man version of it. In 1861, French socialist Pierre Proudhon used the term to describe an “economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor.”8 In What is Property? (1840), Proudhon claimed that property is, per se, “theft.” Like Marx, he gave capitalism a nefarious connotation.

https://theobjectivestandard.com/2018/11/the-mind-based-etymology-of-capitalism/