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capitalism

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Definition an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment — with the belief that voluntary exchanges harness inborn self-interest in millions of decisions that benefit society
  • Capitalism has helped to move millions of people out of poverty.
capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • While most economist see benefits from capitalism, most voters associate it with heartlessness.
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Capitalism may have an invisible hand pushing efficiency, but where is its heart?
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Conservatives support capitalism because it is a way of steering our natural pursuit of self-interest toward the material betterment of society at large.
    Dinesh D'Souza  --  Letters to a Young Conservative
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Supporters of free markets often make the mistake of thinking of capitalism as something that exists in opposition to the state. When it is time to pay taxes, this view can be self-evident. But the reality is more complex. ... If one wanted to see what the absence of government produces, one need only look at Africa — it is not a free-market paradise.
    Fareed Zakaria  --  The Future of Freedom
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.
    Bill Gates
  • Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.
    Milton Friedman
  • ...the West also devised a new way of organizing society around the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution were some of the major signposts on Western civilization's road to modernity.
    Dinesh D'Souza  --  What's So Great About America
  • The great capitalists devouring the little capitalists, concentrating the power and the tools of production in great masses...
    Joseph Conrad  --  The Secret Agent
  • In the long term...technological capitalism is a powerful vehicle for promoting equality....Perhaps the best illustration of the egalitarian effects of techno-capitalism can be shown by life expectancy statistics. In 1900, the life expectancy in America was roughly fifty years. Rich people lived to the age of sixty, while poor people on average died at the age of forty-five....Today, life expectancy in America has climbed to seventy-eight years. The rich guy lives to the age of eighty, while the poor guy drops at the age of seventy-six....Technological capitalism has done more to raise the general standard of living, and to equalize circumstances of rich and poor, than all the government and philanthropic programs put together.
    Dinesh S'Souza  --  Letters to a Young Conservative
  • I said that the Freedom Charter was not a blueprint for socialism but for African-style capitalism.
    Nelson Mandela  --  Long Walk to Freedom
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Many people still live under inhuman conditions while they continue to produce commodities that make capitalists richer and richer.
    Jostein Gaarder  --  Sophie's World
    • capitalists = people who believe in an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment

    or:

    people who are wealthy and clearly benefit from an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses
  • After almost a year back home in America, he has become even more enraged by what he perceives as the injustice of the capitalist system.
    Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard  --  Killing Kennedy
    • capitalist = one who believes in an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment

    or:

    someone who is wealthy clearly and benefits from an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses
  • Whatever it was called-feudalism and serfdom or capitalism and industrial workers, it was unnatural and unjust.
    Boris Pasternak  --  Doctor Zhivago
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • It's capitalism: Cutthroat, profit-motivated and expedient.
    Luis J. Rodriguez  --  Always Running
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • It started to become clear to Wes: the drug game was raw capitalism on overdrive with bullets, a pyramid scheme whose base was dead bodies and ruined lives.
    Wes Moore  --  The Other Wes Moore
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work for wages.
    Upton Sinclair  --  The Jungle
    • capitalists = people who are wealthy and benefit from an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses
  • The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value.
    George Orwell  --  1984
    • capitalism = an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment
  • Her son, the teenage Tolstoyan, believed that wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently evil, which is ironic because Chris was a natural-born capitalist with an uncanny knack for making a buck.
    Jon Krakauer  --  Into the Wild
capitalist = one who believes in an economic system based on private ownership of property and businesses, and on voluntary exchange in a competitive environment

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