The lefties would always bang on about capitalism. It was so tedious to listen to. Their complaints seemed to me pseudo-intellectual. Capitalism was to them an invention by wicked people for wicked people. It was an ideology they said. In my view it was never that. It is a manifestation of what people are and of what they do - i.e. they pursue their interests and attempt to maximise using whatever capital they have be that financial, social, intellectual and the rest. Capitalism is not an idea but a base reality.

Other than in that sense of the term I am no capitalist. Neither was Adam Smith. He was a moral philosopher who put his fertile mind to analysing how human beings are. He didn't root for capitalism in the way it could be said Marx did for communism. Smith was analysing human behaviour. He wasn't advocating capitalism. He was only telling it like it was, how economic systems had a certain inevitability. According to Smith an economy could not be run by government. It was too big a job. The tasks had to be spread out among a populace infinitely pursuing its own interests. In this sense capitalism was more consistent with democracy, as in leaving it to the people to decide, whereas the command economies associated with communism tended to produce totalitarian states. Unlike Marx, Smith wasn’t making predictions. His world was not a utopia like Marx's was. Consequently he has proved more credible than Marx who predicted that capitalism would be replaced with something of higher value and benevolence. So far Marx hasn't been close.

Capitalism and money are often synonymous. I think that is false. Where capitalism is more instinct than invention, money is very much invention. Money or some suchlike version would exist even in a benevolent society. It is an astoundingly clever invention up there with the wheel. Without money every transaction would be a fight to the death. The top dog would always be the most violent. Trading would be subject to the natural laws that prevail in the biological world generally. Through complex networks of transaction everything is given a value in order for trading to be concluded without further argument. This process has a deep psychological hold on everyone. For money to be valid it has to have such a hold. If people were to see through the fact that they spend so much of their lives driven by these little pieces of paper resulting in money loosing its high psychological impact then humanity would be thrown back into pre-history.

Conclusions:

Capitalism is instinctive. Communism is an idea and a false prediction this far. Money is one of the greatest of human inventions. And I am still no capitalist or at least not a very good one.