The ideology of capitalism is not the ideology of liberal democracy
by John MacBeath Watkins We have discussed in an earlier post the fact that none of America's founding fathers would have called themselves capitalists. Some would have called themselves physiocrats, some were mercantilists, but the term capitalism had not yet been invented, and the system the term describes was still being invented. This matters, because during the Cold War, some people started to confuse capitalism with liberal democracy. None of the founding fathers thought that their economic system was itself a mechanism that brought about freedom, because it was the same economic system used by monarchies and empires which lacked freedom. Liberal democracy was born only a little before the invention of capitalism, and long before the ideology of capitalism. By this, I mean that capitalism as an economic system is useful for organizing how we produce and distribute what we need, but it was not always a system of values, beliefs, and ideas that shape how we relate to pol...
