Said another way, Capitalism means living by using capital in pursuit of ongoing exchange of buying power.
Property means ownership, a bundle of rights — right of possession (Jus Possidendi), right of using (Jus Utendi), right of destroying, alienating (Jus Abutendi), right of recovery when found in the wrongful possession of another (Jus Vindicandi).
Bare subsistence means consuming as fast as producing. This is what toilers do when not enabled to be efficient and profitable by those with superior intelligence.
Competitive commercialism has raised all of mankind through all time above bare subsistence.
Poverty is the default starting status for all humans. It is through efficiency that leads to surplus and surplus that creates credit that leads to exchange, lifting others to specialize and become efficient, which sows the seed for forever ongoing prosperity.
Laborers would toil with brute force barely producing anything but bare subsistence if not for the geniuses who devise means of efficiency. It is the originality of the few, the shrewd thinkers, who bring efficiency to the toiling laborer and in so doing, raises up the laborer from being merely a bare subsistence savage.
Humans are insatiable in their wants. No sooner that one want gets met that a newer one takes its place. It is through efficiency of production that achieves new things of wealth, which can get exchanged for these wants. New wants require workers to take up the call.
Tribalists the earth over, whether in history or in contemporary times live by bare subsistence precisely because they believe in communal ownership and reject property. If nature blesses them in any year, providing surplus, they swap through barter.
Without property, the bundle of rights that include possession, use, destruction, transfer and recovery from wrongful possession, there cannot can not be liberty.
Because they don't have property, money fails to arise in their lives in any meaningful way and thus credit fails to materialize. Without property and trade reckoned by money, tribalists never shall escape bare subsistence living, or what all recognize as poverty.
People escape poverty and enter into authentic prosperity through efficiency of wanted production. When the day comes that all others rid themselves of politicians is the day that mankind shall enter into Utopia.
It is most natural for any of mankind to better herself or better himself rather than remaining stagnant for all of one's days in poverty. Those who remain stagnant for their days, who stick out their hands or who rely upon the violence of others for their existence are but caricatures of humans, gargoyles, grotesque, distorted.
Never in the history of humans have politicians lifted people from poverty. Politicians can only take by implied force from the efficient and dole to the inefficient.
Activist governance, the kind whereby politicians can dictate what one can do with property, reduces property to mere privilege. At bedrock, activist governance is what is wrong with American life today.
Defensive governance, the kind whereby men come into harmony to protect property and thus echo the goodness of nature, is the only justification for governance of any kind.
Men can first attest the word capital into English from the early 1200s, from the Old French capital, in turn from the Latin capitalis meaning of the head and thus that which is chief, first.
By the 1610s, English speakers began saying capital in its financial meaning taking such from the medieval Latin word capitale meaning stock, that which gets sold, that which one has property to sell.
The coinage of the word capitalism arises from 1854, meaning state of having capital, of having that which can be sold in exchange.
Speakers can give precise meaning with words. Not knowing what these words mean causes mischief in the minds.
Gab It
