Johnny Damon Tells MLB Network He Would Prefer to Enter the Hall of Fame as a Royal

He made it clear that he was going to become a free agent in order to get the maximum amount of money possible. He said the Royals were his hometown team, but he elevated pursuit of money above all else. And this despite the fact that he was going to be a millionaire several times over no matter the result.

Capitalism plays an important role in our society. Of course, so does religion and so does charity. There are some impulses pushing people to maximize their profits and others pushing them to forgo profits in pursuit of other goals. I don’t think there’s anything un-American about saying somebody is too focused on maximizing their money.

I’m not saying markets didn’t exist. Markets existed thousands of years ago.

But, slavery aside, we did not distribute the basic elements of production through markets. There were no meaningful markets for labor, capital, or land. Capitalism, a system of organizing economic activity through markets requires those. Mercantilism, a government-imposed and controlled system of distributing production of raw materials in the periphery and intermediate and finished goods in the center is closer to the opposite of capitalism than a forerunner to it.

We had apprenticeships and we had indentured servants, but grown adults worked for themselves. When the growth of factories in the early 19th century first put people in a position of “employee” they were derided as “wage slaves,” hardly better than the africans in bondage in the South.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations first sketched the theoretical basis for capitalism in 1776. The essential elements of modern capitalism, private corporations and liquid financial markets, both first appear in America in the early 19th century. The government first experimented with auctions for land (rather than giving it away or selling it at a fixed price) around the same time. The development of factories as part of the industrial revolution in Britain paralleled these advances in America, and although it was still rather primitive, the economic system in America by the mid-19th century can fairly be called capitalism. But to say it existed a century before is to expand the definition of capitalism to include basically any economic system.

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