I love Capitalism… or at least what I think “Capitalism” defines. I like Wikipedia’s definition:
Capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are owned by private persons, and operated for profit and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are predominantly determined through the operation of a free market. Capitalism is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and corporations to trade, incorporate, employ workers, and use money, in goods, services (including finance), labor and land. By definition, production and distribution in a capitalist system are governed by the free market rather than state regulation, though this does not exclude the state defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market and may include the provision of a few basic public goods and infrastructure.
The idea of private individuals owning their own means of production, selling the fruits of their production according to their own rules… that’s the Capitalism I like!
Basically, it comes from my fascination of distributed systems. In a distributed system, you don’t create a giant, massive system that controls everything. You crate many small systems that do their specific job, and do that job extremely well, and that communicate with each other through a defined interface. In some cases, such a distributed system is less efficient than a monolithic master-control type system. But I believe that such a distributed system, with the correct communication interface, is more fair to all the separate jobs and processes.
To step back out of nerd land and go into regular person territory, it’s my belief that many specialists can do a job better than many jack-of-all-trades, or one specialist controlling many mindless robots. It’s my belief that Capitalism, as defined above, allows each individual actor to act as a specialist of his own life, focused on what’s important to him… but just like the distributed system above, it’s the sum of all the parts, not each individual actor, which makes Capitalism tick.
Having discussed my thoughts with my friends, endlessly, around and around, I once threatened to write a series of thought experiments about Capitalism (many specialist actors)… how the actors come to be, how they interact, and the overall outcomes of their interaction. I state my love of Capitalism right now because I don’t claim that my thought experiments will be unbiased; I expect that bias will show though a bit, and I depend on the Internet community to call out (loudly, and full of vitriol) when I become to blatant!
In this thought experiment, we will follow the life of Bob, the name of a homesteader at an indistinct time in the past… somewhere around 500 years ago, somewhere in the European Continent. Bob, being dissatisfied with life, has decided to pack up what he owns (a few trifling possessions) and move to that part of the map between the O and the N in “Here There Be Dragons.” As such, he is all alone, with no outside influences… he’s gone so far away from the established government systems of his time that, frankly, he’s independently starting his own country.
Stay tuned as we follow Bob as he tries to come to grips with his new life at the mercy of Mother Nature, and see what happens as time progresses.
