Monday, November 12, 2007

The Relationship of Capitalism and America

While capitalism was by no means invented by the United States, it has come to be a symbol of American values, like baseball and apple pie. A free market economy is now expected with a democracy, although the two in actuality have nothing to do with the other. It is interesting to note that these two have become interchangeable with the other, merely as a result of how the American ideal has permeated the majority of the rest of the world.

Capitalism originated in Europe long before the colonies were settled, with the merchant trades of Holland and England especially. American was founded as a capitalist venture, and the burgeoning nation never looked back. When wars occupied the majority of Europe in the early 1800s, the United States was able to serve as the neutral supplier to the continent, allowing the country to have over 300 corporations at the time, while England and France had only a few dozen each. This jump start allowed America to be at the forefront of industrialization, a movement that created an entire class of “new money” in the late 1800s.

Today, capitalism is largely associated with the United States, even though its origins had begun long before we became a global power. Analyzing this effect seems to be important to understanding American business as a whole. It seems that the free market broke away from a symbol of the Western world as a whole, to just the United States, in the aftermath of World War II, when the country was able to capitalize on its position as the only big nation not hit hard by the war. While other European nations were rebuilding during the 1950s, America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and used the free market economy to flaunt its liberties over its only remaining competitor, the Soviet Union. I think it is this precedent, set when the U.S. was the nation to emulate, that established democracy and capitalism as interrelated. Today, developing countries seem to assume these two principles are necessary to discovering the wealth America has achieved, and that one can not succeed with the other.

No comments: