What is Capitalism to you?

*** Capitalism
According to one dictionary, capitalism is a system in which “the means of production and distribution are privately owned and operated for profit.”

Jakob Fugger, a wealthy merchant of the Middle Ages from Augsburg, Germany, also operated the General Agency of the pope, which collected fees for indulgences. Historian Erich Kahler believes that capitalism originated with Fugger, writing:

“Some modern economists and sociologists have tried to prove that there were traces of capitalism as far back as Babylon. But what they discovered is not capitalism. Capitalism is not identical with wealth and mobile property, it is not identical with money-making and money-lending, not even with a mere productive investment of property. All this is no capitalism in itself, for all this may serve a life principle, alien to economic aims, it may be done for a human end, a human purpose, for something a human being can enjoy. But here, for the first time, . . . business in itself, money-making in itself, production of goods and heaping up of comforts, assumed such power over man that he spent all of his vitality, his heart, all his present and future, all his human being, in the literal sense of the word, in a restless, a persistently growing and devouring production per se, a production, the final meaning of which he has completely lost and forgotten.

“And this is the beginning of capitalism, which is the rule of capital over man, the rule of the economic function over the human heart. Here begins the autonomy of economy, the restless, boundless progress of exploitation of nature and production of goods which nobody has the leisure or the capacity to enjoy any longer. The consequences of this development are today clearly revealed.”—Man the Measure.