It makes me chuckle when people claim the United States Constitution is “capitalist.” It is nothing of the sort. And no, the idea of private property is not mutually exclusive to socialism.
If you were to look at the Constitution objectively it has fairly compelling socialism overtones. It starts in the preamble with “provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare…”, two overtly socialist ideals. It then goes on to list all the things the government will own and regulate. Commerce, military, currency and more, expanded by the necessary and proper clause. This has evolved into things such as the interstate road system, air traffic control, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, labor laws, corporate regulations, guaranteed public education, energy regulation, agriculture subsidies, federal infrastructure…the list goes on. All made possible by the Constitution.
The type of Socialism that you have stuck in your craw, has no connection to the type of social ideals that have proven to foster a better and more equitable society overall.
There are many examples in western Europe…but god forbid we emulate those people.
You guys will ignore the oligarchs, as long as you can have the mirage of “Freedom!”
Yes, it is. It emerged in the modern age, in trade between the Netherlands and England.
The Constitution has nothing to do with capitalism. The BoR has nothing to do with capitalism.
Their authors were agrarian slavers and mercantilists.
Brittanica:
“Mercantilism , economic theory and practice common in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century that promoted governmental regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. It was the economic counterpart of political absolutism. Its 17th-century publicists—most notably Thomas Mun in England, Jean-Baptiste Colbert in France, and Antonio Serra in Italy—never, however, used the term themselves; it was given currency by the Scottish economist Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776).”
And, when you look at how capitalist relations developed in mercantilist states (England, France, Spain, Japan, Greece, Egypt, Iran, Russia, Turkey, the US) and how it developed where the protectionism and centralism declined, or were aborted, before capitalist relations took hold, you can see a real distinction in the forms they take.
In the countries with a protectionist foundation, the insularity and tendency towards a national economy persist, and they are most often cohered through what is now rather benignly called ‘defense spending’ which is a recapitulation of the mercantilist assumptions about national economies.
In those nations where protectionism was killed off or did not become the dominant economic mode pre-capitalization, not only are those countries profoundly capitalized (Netherlands, north Germany, north Italy, Switzerland, the Scandi countries, Scotland in tension with and within GB,) but they are equally unlikely to preference spending which nationalizes economic decisions or centralizes the economy as a possession if the state and its subjects.
You have a misinformed understanding of capitalism.
Trade and property do not capitalism make. Were that so, Phoenician merchants in the Tin Islands would have been capitalists, which they rather absolutely were not.
One of the things often overlooked by manichean assertions about the goodness or badness of economic relations, is how the tensions and conflicts arise in a country where the foundational and codified assumptions of indissoluble union, planned expansion and national economy come to clash with the global triumph of North European capitalism, its loosening of constraints on monetary flow, and the dissolution of non-military protectionism as a means of holding regions together as a state.
Pretty much everything happening in the US right now - especially the crises of identity percolating and boiling up as immigration stances, cultural postures, vax status, race conflict, and the structure of policing - has re-emerged or been exacerbated by the historically rapid shift to free trade, and its effects on population/currency flow and concentration of capital.
The Constitution requires - demands, really - a union of interests, and a managerial function for Congress, that is now in deep and unresolvable conflict with global capital exchange and its tendency to overwhelm merely regional objections to monetary and population flows.
The US capitalist and other elites have tended to try to manage this with incarceration, defense spending and public works, but the rise of a virulent anti-public strain of nativism and past-oriented nationalism has made the party that used to abolish blocks to free trade and capital flow do a volte face, to become an identitarian movement with crippling contradictions at the heart of its fury.