>>6839997They seem to be conflating capitalism as an economic organizing principle with... right wing dictators who encouraged capitalism in their markets despite holding absolute political control.
Of course the Tsars didn't use capitalism in any meaningful way, and Truman was democratically elected, but meh.
My sense, and this is just a guess, is that they're responding to anarcho-capitalists saying that "my specific... brand of capitalism has never been tried" with historic examples of cultures that weren't anarcho-capitalist.
My working theory is that capitalism as an economic system can fit inside a variety of political frameworks, but communism, even though it's also an economic system, requires political and military power. So it tends to limit itself to dictatorships. You can't be a commie unless you are willing to accept a dictator. And you can be a capitalist and accept a dictator, as long as they don't take your shit.
The funny thing with those examples, at least the German, Chilean, and US ones, is that the economies of those areas thrived under capitalism. The fact that the politics of those areas were bad wasn't a result of capitalism, I don't think.
