How I Realized I’m a Capitalist

The misconception

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It was not so long ago, when I didn’t actually know what capitalism really means. I was of course probably thought the theory in school, but I didn’t really care back then.

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Up until now the closest definition I had for capitalists was something like “money lovers”. For example in various discussions with the topic “what income is sufficient in order to be able to raise children”, when someone told me “at least 75k CZK(3409 dollars) combined” (which makes it about 25k CZK( 1136 dollars) above average salary), I was astonished how much money they think they need for living. My rather close minded and uneducated opinion was that they simply love the money, therefore they are capitalists. How wrong I was.

I was biased and probably thought that money is one of the sources of the evil. When I look at it retrospectively I might have been influenced by my father and his colleges (he’s a banker, so I guess you can imagine the morale out there). What I was not realizing is that money is not the source making people selfish and all the other “bad” things that I attribute to most of the wealthy people I know. It’s the mind-set of the people that is causing them to act like shit (be it temporarily or permanent, which is kinda irrelevant here and now).

Capitalism from my point of view

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There are some things in the world that are pretty obvious. Every single thing in the world has some value to any given individual, be it food, water, car, PC, or even life. The value of course changes under the influence of factors beyond imagination. In order for people to trade between each other, it’s super hard to convey the individual perception of value of any given thing without a “common language” – money. It is the middle-commodity enabling us to trade anything for anything.

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Money is a great tool to measure the efficiency of the services we provide. When we gain less than what we had to give in order to realize the service, we are inefficient and vice-versa. Also without money, there wouldn’t be any “prize signals”. There wouldn’t be any means how to send the signal there is lack of something (the prize goes up and more people are attracted to providing the services, or alternative one), or that there is too much of something (the prize goes down, and the motivation to provide such services is diminishing). Those signals aren’t really working in a way they should be because of all the grants, but that is topic for different time. The bigger the civilization is, the bigger need for such a tool arises if the civilization wants to operate effectively.

Funny thing is that nowadays political guidelines are all capitalistic. Most awkward are communistic parties, which were initially created to oppose capitalism (as far as I’m concerned) and for whatever reasons are doing the same thing, just with more totality applied (well the reason probably is that it is impossible not to be capitalistic in today’s world :D). I don’t know how the situation with lefty political parties in other countries, but here in Czech they do not verbally offend only the righty parties, but also all the problems the capitalists caused, doing basically the same biased mistake I have been doing few years ago.

Summary

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Who I formerly thought are capitalists are now perceived simply as “those who love to accumulate wealth”. I now know that being a capitalist doesn’t necessarily mean that one wants to accumulate as much wealth as possible. It’s simple the believe that money is actually doing a great job in creating the “common language“ in terms of value for all the trades. 99% of people living in bigger civilizations are bound to trade sooner or later, because it is simply impossible to grow build and create everything manually. Money is not roots of all evil and should not be addressed as such.

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