Why Capitalism
REIGNS SUPREME Background Photo courtesy of The George S. Bolster Collection
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WRITTEN BY MIKE PIEKARSKI
t’s a phrase Americans have been uttering for a long time: “It’s a free country!” In the United States, that phrase can refer to our collective freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or a number of other rights. And in the U.S., in monetary terms, we live by yet another form of autonomy, summarized by a different phrase: “free-market economy.” America, in fact, is the world’s foremost free-market economy. No other country with that type of system (or any other, for that matter) has a greater economic output. As of 2021, the United States had the world’s biggest economy in nominal gross domestic product, about $22 trillion, based on International Monetary Fund estimations. And the engine that drives that free-market economy is CAPITALISM.
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Capitalism, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.” Capitalism is the most commonly employed economic system in the world. Want to see it in action? Look no further than Wall Street and the stock market. There, large, publicly traded companies sell stock to raise capital, which is bought and sold by investors via a system in which prices are directly affected by supply and demand. In this system, everyone can participate, from individual investors to major financial investment firms. In other words, it is ordinary people and companies, rather than the government, that call the economic shots.
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