What else is There?

That’s when real capitalism ended. The basis of capitalism is individualism. Today, the economies of nations that are typically referred to as capitalist are in fact mixed economies — they incorporate certain aspects of capitalism and certain aspects of planed economies. Capitalism rejects all government intervention in economic matters. The economic system stems from humanistic ideals of the 18th century European Enlightenment — beliefs that each human being is individually unique and valuable. In pure capitalism, things like child labor laws, Social Security, anti-discriminatory hiring practices and a minimum wage have no place.

The laborers use that money to purchase the goods they want. The more profit the capitalists bring in, the more goods they produce. Society is made up of consumers: Because people are disconnected from the goods they produce, the process of buying things, not of creating things, becomes the primary way in which people define themselves. In this way, no one who purchases goods (the consumer) has any real connection to those goods. The more goods the capitalists produce, the lower the price of those goods. Rational calculation for profit guides production: The capitalists try to judge the market and adjust production accordingly in order to realize the greatest possible profit.

Over the next 500 years, mercantilism became what we now call capitalism. Soon after capitalism became the most popular economic system, it also became one of the most despised. In a capitalist economic system, the owner of production is the individual, and the benefactors of production are first the individual and second the society. By the 19th century, capitalism was the dominant economic system in most of the world’s established nations. What else is there? In the next section, we’ll look at why this economic principle evokes such passionate viewpoints.

But mercantilism continued to thrive throughout Arabia. From Spain and Portugal, mercantilism spread to the rest of Europe, which resumed its mercantile economic system by the 14th century. Arabs, who were predominantly Islamic, were positioned perfectly for a profit as goods moved along Middle Eastern trade routes between Egypt, Persia and the later Roman and Ottoman Empires. The rapid spread of Islam in the 700s brought the practice of mercantilism to Africa, Asia and parts of southern Europe.