You guys ever have it where your researching a post reply and along the way your browser restarts and you lose the post you were replying to?
Feels bad man.
Anyway, forget it I'm going to end up saying what I was going to say anyway.
Capitalism as we understand it today is an extremely new phenomenon, only about 200 years old. They were traders before that, but not private control and ownership of capital and a lot of the elements that we consider to be related to capitalism today.
Often governments are at odds with merchants because the government gets power by virtue of being the government, but merchants get power by virtue of their own success. Even in the last 50 years or so there's actually been a lot of turnover in who "the rich" is. Many major companies that used to exist have completely disappeared.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/when-big-brands-houdini-1.2801861
By the way, for anyone who has never seen them, Terry O'Reilly's radio shows on advertising are really good. I'm not going to pretend, he's a little bit woke, but not to the extent that it breaks the good work that he does helping to break down how advertising is done and how it has been done in the past. The three shows that I'm aware of are O'Reilly on advertising, the age of persuasion, and under the influence. I definitely recommend them, because he's done a really good job and he's got a lot of useful insights in there.
Feels bad man.
Anyway, forget it I'm going to end up saying what I was going to say anyway.
Capitalism as we understand it today is an extremely new phenomenon, only about 200 years old. They were traders before that, but not private control and ownership of capital and a lot of the elements that we consider to be related to capitalism today.
Often governments are at odds with merchants because the government gets power by virtue of being the government, but merchants get power by virtue of their own success. Even in the last 50 years or so there's actually been a lot of turnover in who "the rich" is. Many major companies that used to exist have completely disappeared.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/when-big-brands-houdini-1.2801861
By the way, for anyone who has never seen them, Terry O'Reilly's radio shows on advertising are really good. I'm not going to pretend, he's a little bit woke, but not to the extent that it breaks the good work that he does helping to break down how advertising is done and how it has been done in the past. The three shows that I'm aware of are O'Reilly on advertising, the age of persuasion, and under the influence. I definitely recommend them, because he's done a really good job and he's got a lot of useful insights in there.
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We still have examples today of what Marx called "tribal communism". What we find is that there is in fact a class structure. Sure, everything "belongs to the tribe", but the leaders of the tribe are at the top and so everything is really theirs, followed by the friends and family of the leaders, followed by everyone else, and the enemies of the leaders at the bottom. That's also as you note essentially the same stories for many ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia (which was controlled by the priest class at first and then the war kings later) and ancient Egypt (where the pharaoh was both the king and the head of the religion as I recall)
You're absolutely right about capitalism done right, and you can see that the thing that makes someone insanely rich often isn't capitalism but finding ways to get the state to choose to make you insanely rich with its power of law. When you watch "shark tank", you see people with business ideas, and what are the ideas that get big funding aren't the ones that are the best ideas, but the ones that have a patent or a copyright or some other proprietary thing where the state will step in and kill off any competition.
You're absolutely right about capitalism done right, and you can see that the thing that makes someone insanely rich often isn't capitalism but finding ways to get the state to choose to make you insanely rich with its power of law. When you watch "shark tank", you see people with business ideas, and what are the ideas that get big funding aren't the ones that are the best ideas, but the ones that have a patent or a copyright or some other proprietary thing where the state will step in and kill off any competition.
Success is certainly possible, what the fact that eBay didn't last forever also goes to show that you have to keep on working to get better and better or else someone else is going to build a better mouse trap.