I like a good "Just So" story as much as the next guy, and these are good ones. But there are no chartered monopolies anymore (except unprofitable ones), and VISA issues as much money as it wants. Meanwhile, the dollar loses value the way grain receipts did, with the same salutary effect.

“Capitalism” is a certain kind of specialization under which people with a proven record of assessing managers decide who will get to manage enterprises, and those managers organize enterprises to make things for the rest of us. Capitalism survives because it meets the selective pressure of resource optimization by paying everybody the most for the thing they do best. In conditions of scarcity, that amount may be awful, but capitalism seeks to create technologies that will reduce scarcity. The object of the seeking is not an improvement in living standards, but the improvement happens anyway. We who hate business can call the improvement an “unintended consequence” of capitalism. But it’s 2020, and we are woke enough to judge behaviors by impact not intention. Capitalism has, over the centuries, coincided with an improvement in living standards. Deal with it.

Because general prosperity is only an unintentional by-product of capitalism, we can expect the system go off the rails from time to time. This leads some to believe that we can through politics establish a system in which prosperity is the intention. Sounds good if you say it fast enough, but the problem is that capitalism depends on entrepreneurial skill, and politics depends on political skill. Capitalism, like democracy, is as bad as it is, but better than anything else.

The intention/impact problem lies in the artificial line between economics and politics. In a self-governing society that uses capitalism as its economic engine, government should act as a collective bargaining agent for interests otherwise too diffuse to organize. Capitalism is essentially competitive. That’s how it gets people to do the thing they do best by paying them the most for doing it. But competition has externalities, like child labor, watered milk, and a despoiled environment. Each of these behaviors enables a vendor to sell for less to enough people to make money by doing so more profitable than not doing so.

The rational response of the citizenry to such depredations is simple: we should boycott businesses that employ children, adulterate their products, or pollute the planet. But boycotts are difficult to organize, and difficult to enforce when there is money to be saved by buying what is cheapest. Still, it is absolutely essential to understand that if we boycotted companies that do things that are bad for the common weal, no companies would do those things. Therefore, if we can find another way to prevent companies from doing those things, we would achieve the exact same thing as a boycott. Therefore, by some simple Euclidean politics (things equal to equal things are equal to each other), a law prohibiting a practice is the same thing as a mass boycott of its practitioners. And boycotts are essentially economic actions, a form of bargaining, just like a strike. Or, as Gen von Clausewitz might say, politics is just economics continued by other means.

The point here is that “capitalism” is just natural selection, and government is just a form of man-made selective pressure. Capitalism is entirely controllable by the republic, subject to Mr. Franklin’s warning that we only have a republic so long as we can keep it. It is right, therefore, to recognize and fear the concentration of wealth and the capture of politics by capitalists. But we have seen what happens when “the proletariat” captures government, and it ain’t pretty. We must break up the behemoths through anti-trust action, and we must break up dynasties through an estate tax. But we must not kill the golden goose just because we have for the nonce let it run amok. Yank the leash, yes. But do be careful, because the goose you cook might be your own.