Member-only story
Explaining Capitalism
There’s an unfortunate human tendency to use words we don’t actually understand, which leads us into believing things that aren’t actually true, which leads us to form ideas about people and policy that aren’t actually helpful in any way.
Let’s take a look at the word Liberal.
In the USA this word is thrown around by right-wing folk and means nothing more than “people with ideas I neither understand nor wish to understand but which seem to threaten me so I’m against it.”
It’s an insult.
I doubt more than three people in the USA today have read J.S. Mill’s On Liberty and thus have any clue about the origins of the concept and thus what the word really means. I’ve never met a right-winger in the USA who can even provide the vaguest definition of the word liberal.
Likewise the word Capitalism is most often used in a negative way by those fancying themselves as progressives yet few if any have any idea of what the word means. Just as gluten became synonymous with “bad” so capitalism has likewise become synonymous with “bad.” This is just lazy, because in reality neither gluten nor capitalism can be reduced to one three-letter word.
There are very few people who’ve actually read Adam Smith’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations. Most folk have been influenced by third-hand accounts of…
