(just takes a great deal of rule of law and trade before it has any scale)

Western civilization has been making use of capitalism since its inception in pre-history. We can see it in the language artifacts of the period, and in their various archeological remains.

We did not invent corporations in the period, only extended them to the middle and upper middle classes thereby expanding the institutions that had previously served a very limited minority.

What the article describes is the expansion of free capital from a small pool of secular individuals (aristocracy, priesthood) to the middle and upper middle classes in those places with sufficient rule of law also extended to the middle and upper middle classes.

This was possible because of technological improvements in sail, increase in population, the culmination of success of the germanic states (Hansa), and the extreme windfall of opening of transatlantic trade – rapidly expanding beyond the previous trade routes of the mediterranean through the indian ocean.

Capitalism.

—“an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”—

All we see is the necessity of redistributing people from subsistence farming and production with minor market participation and speculation to the majority if not all of people, gradually depending upon market participation and speculation for their subsistence, in order to increase the division of labor, increase productivity thereby, and as a consequence decrease the costs of goods, services, and information in relation to time spent working.

Capitalism consists of nothing more than property rights insured by rule of law.

The expansion of capitalism raised us out of poverty – particularly the poorest.

The problem with the current condition of capitalism (property rights) is that in order to generate the taxation from improved commerce, the state (beginning in the coal era) rapidly removed rights of suit for damage by externalities.

In other words, the state removed universal standing in matters of the commons and took to itself (centralized) governance (management) of the commons.

This is an easily reversible bit of legal fudge-ery that will restore via negativa competition by court to its historical parallel with via positiva competition by markets.

Now the capitalism vs socialism debate is in fact a dishonest bit of rhetorical framing (critique) by a certain minority specializing in propaganda – that’s just historical fact.

The debate instead is economic rule of law (capitalism) versus economic rule by arbitrary discretion (socialism).

We do not repair the problem of licensed-predation-via-externality by simply granting the state the right of arbitarary discretion free of punitive consequence instead of the private sector the right of arbitrary discretion free of punitive consequence.

We fix the problem of insuring that NO ONE has license for predation by externality, by restoring universal standing in the matters of the commons.

Replacing one minority’s use of pilpul and critique (lying) with our own use of pilpul and critique (lying) only reduces the only people capable of rule of law to the same (low) level as those that invented and use pilpul and critique.

(Which you seem to have a pattern of doing yourself it seems.)