Economics for Occupiers Pt. 6: A Brief History of Capitalism.

Many of the modern occupy movement’s criticisms of capitalism are echoes of those leveled against the free market from the earliest days of industrialization. Critics of capitalism point at the failures of the free market in the early 20^th century and the abuses that occurred then, and thus conclude that capitalism is inherently flawed and that the free market doesn’t work. Once that conclusion is accepted, it opens the door for governmental controls designed to limit or strangle the free market, and eventually leads to a command-driven economy and tyranny.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that it presumes the early industrial era was an honest example of free-market capitalism, and that lessons learned there would translate to any free market. This is simply not so.

Read more about this in chapter 7 of Economic for Occupiers, now available on Amazon.com.