Question

Please describe how America’s system was originally designed to meet the parameters of capitalism; its foundations that our freedoms enable and features and circumstances that interact to produce economic results.

Answer 1

In its origins and subsequent history, no nation was more market-oriented than the United States of America. The country's very settling, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and to Alaska and Hawaii, was a long business trip. Also today, more Americans are likely to have made fortunes from the appreciation of real estate values than from any other source. Yet property is just the starting point of American capitalism's epochal drama. That story was one of intense and unceasing competition compared to the long-term business stories of all other large countries.

The ravenous hunger of Americans for land was born in the early years of European poverty facing New World opportunity. Demand, which had been pent up for decades, found plenty of supply unexpectedly. The greed for more and more territories of the colonists forced them implacably westward, where they could set up farms and ranches which they could own. This was the earliest form of the American Dream, and it had an aura of double-edged incredulity for the people living the dream. Not only for their own good fortune, but also for the backbreaking work needed to capitalize on it, there was disbelief.

From the colonial period through the early national years, and into the 19th century, everything in the new country seemed to be catching. The government gave away large, seemingly unlimited tracts of land or sold at irresistibly low prices. Neither the first colonists nor the pioneers pressing across the border had much compunction about dispossessing Native Americans or one another in order to get the best land. They sometimes resorted to an outright assassination. The West movement was a great epic, but it wasn't a pretty story in its details.

There are several million companies in the U.S. today, and at the official birth of the country in 1776 a few existed. Only in the mid-nineteenth century, the system became central to the American economy, but it was actually present at the development 250 years earlier. The settlers arrived at Jamestown in 1607 under the London Virginia Company's charter. Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1630 under the auspices of another English company.

Persecuted for their religious beliefs in England, they received a royal land grant in America in 1681 and continued to develop their new colony on both spiritual and business principles. Pennsylvania's Quaker merchants are becoming prosperous international traders. Like New England's Puritan merchants, they used their family and religious connections to form a tight, long-distance network of trustworthy relationships. One of the necessary conditions for strong economic growth is this type of system for making reliable business commitments.

Thus capitalism came in the first ships and in many different forms: legitimate trade, legal cover for freedom of religion, slave trade, and labor exchange for a ticket to America by individuals. None of these examples, however, reflected modern capitalism. The First Industrial Revolution had little to do with it, let alone the Second or Third. Each was concerned with agriculture, trade and finance, not engineering and manufacturing. But all incorporated powerful elements of capitalism, which proved to be crucial for the future of the nation.