Capitalism is a Marxist word. Karl Mark invented the term. capitalism, as a way of demonizing free market economy. Using the term capitalism plays into socialist hands. We should always refer to our way of commerce as “a free market economy” or “free enterprise system” and our government should be republic and not democracy, like all the good socialist teachers have drummed into our heads all our lives.
True, but you are talking to a brick wall trying to get some people here to understand that.
The etymology of the word capital has roots in the trade and ownership of animals. The Latin root of capital is capitalis, from the proto-Indo-European kaput, which means "head", this being how wealth was measured--the number of heads in a person's livestock. The terms chattel and cattle itself also derive from this same origin.
The lexical connections between animal trade and economics can also be seen in the names of many currencies and words about money: fee (faihu), rupee (rupya), buck (a deerskin), pecuniary (pecu), stock (livestock), and peso (pecu or pashu) all derive from animal-trade origins.
Although Adam Smith is often described as the "father of capitalist thinking," he never used the term "capitalism". He described his own preferred economic system as "the system of natural liberty." However, Smith defined "capital" as stock, and "profit" as the just expectation to keep the revenue from improvements to that stock. Smith also made capital improvement the central goal of the economic and political system.[45]
Arthur Young[46] first used the term capitalist of his economic surveys in his work Travels in France (1792).[47] Samuel Taylor Coleridge,[46] an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk (1823).[48] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used capitalist in his first work What is Property? (1840) to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli[46] used capitalist in the 1845 work Sybil. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also used capitalist (Kapitalist) as a private owner of capital in The Communist Manifesto (1848).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,[46] capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854, by which he meant by having ownership of capital.
According to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the term private capitalism in 1863.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred the capitalistic system (kapitalistisches System)[49][50] to the capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsform) in Das Kapital (1867).[51] The word "capitalism" only appears twice in Das Kapital, namely in tome II, p.124 (German edition) and in Theories about Surplus Value, tome II, p.493 (German edition). However, the late Engels made more frequent use of the term "capitalism". Marx's notion of the capitalist mode of production is characterised as a system of primarily private ownership of the means of production in a mainly market economy, with a legal framework on commerce and a physical infrastructure provided by the state.[52]
An 1877 work entitled Better Times, and an unknown author in 1884 of the Pall Mall Gazette, also used the term capitalism.[46]
However, the first use of capitalism to describe the production system was by the German economist Werner Sombart, in his 1902 book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben). Sombart's close friend and colleague, Max Weber, also used capitalism in his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus).