Portal:Capitalism
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Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are mostly privately owned, and capital is invested in the production, distribution and other trade of goods and services, for profit in a competitive free market. These include factors of production such as land and other natural resources, labor and capital goods. Various theories have tried to explain what capitalism is, to justify, or critique the private ownership of capital, and to explain the operation of markets and guide the application or elimination of government regulation of property and markets.
Capitalist economic practices became institutionalized in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, although some features of capitalist organization existed in the ancient world. Capitalism has emerged as the Western world's dominant economic system since the decline of feudalism, which eroded traditional political and religious restraints on capitalist exchange. Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism gradually spread from Europe, particularly from Britain, across global political and cultural frontiers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism provided the main, but not exclusive, means of industrialization throughout much of the world.
The concept of capitalism has limited analytic value, given the great variety of historical cases over which it is applied, varying in time, geography, politics and culture.
A free market is a market where price is determined by unregulated supply and demand; the opposite is a controlled market, where supply, demand, and price are set by a government. According to a more philosophical definition, a "free" market is a market where trades are morally voluntary and therefore free from the interference of force and fraud. The notion of a free market is closely associated with laissez-faire economic philosophy, which advocates approximating this condition in the real world by mostly confining government intervention in economic matters to regulating against force and fraud among market participants. Hence, with government force limited to a defensive role, government itself does not initiate force in the marketplace beyond levying taxes in order to fund the maintenance of the free marketplace. A few extreme free market advocates oppose even taxation.
New York City is a major center and important symbol of capitalism.
Ayn Rand February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982), born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (Russian: Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум), was a Russian-born American novelist and philosopher best known for developing Objectivism and for writing the novels The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, and Anthem. A broadly influential figure in post-WWII America, her work attracted both enthusiastic admiration and scathing denunciations.
Rand's writing emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality, reason, rational egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism, while attacking what she saw as the irrationality and immorality of altruism, collectivism, and communism. She believed that people must choose their values and actions by reason; that the individual has a right to exist for his or her own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and that no one has the right to take what belongs to others by physical force or fraud, or impose their moral code on others by physical force. Her politics have been described as minarchism and libertarianism, though she never used the first term and detested the second.[2]
The express goal of Rand's fiction was to showcase the idealized Randian hero,[3] a man whose ability and independence causes conflict with society, but who nevertheless perseveres to achieve his goals.
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