this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Yeah - the basis of capitalism is giving someone a loan since you believe they will pay you back more.
And that started way earlier than 400 years
I wonder where that number came from
Before it was merely people using money.
I've seen an interesting video about it a few months ago: 400 years ago is actually mercantilism. It means people build their fortune out of selling goods. Before that, it was about possessing lands and taxing the people who lived there.
Capitalism is different than both. It's not born 400 years ago with the trading with the America. It's born with the industrial revolution when the bourgeoisie seized the power with democracy.
The shocking thing is as you learn about mercantilism you learn that so many rich people seem to actually believe in Mercantilism rather than Capitalism. A big part of Mercantilism was the idea that all deals have a winner and a loser, and that no financial deal can be mutually beneficial. It encourages tribalism, and ruthless cutthroat competition between countries, and it encourages really predatory financial agreements between parties. If you're making a financial transaction and know that the one party is going to be screwed over by it, you might as well screw over the other party as much as you can get away with to ensure you're the winner and not the loser.
I guess capitalism can be seen as an extension of mercantilism, but now they don't only trade goods but everything they can. They're the same people so the ruthless cutthroat part would merely be their original philosophy.
From the Dutch who would sell shares of the profit they were going to make before a voyage. Very different from the norm at the time when usually a monarch or noble would fund such projects. I personally think it's a very good spot in history to think of the beginning of capitalism
Investing money in someone to start a business because you believed that business would be worth it in the end happened way earlier though.
That's just more abstract as the final value you can receiv isn't capped anymore - but just having a loan-based economic model is already pretty capitalistic tbh.
But I see how what was basically the creation of stocks can also be seen as a starting point
I think the more important change was that it wasn't just nobles it was a wealthy merchant class investing
I think the basis for capitalism is actually that the price of a product or labor is set by the market. It probably "started" the first time Gork traded Thmm a spear for 3 shiny rocks.