Capitalism- After reading the book

After reading about capitalism in the textbook, I definitely gained a lot more knowledge about the logistics behind it. Before reading, if we are being completely honest,the  things we talked about in class along with my VERY little preliminary knowledge on this topic, amounted to a very confused and cynical Nadia. But I think I kinda understand the system more now. In the book, the definition of capitalism is summarized as an economic system in which private parties make their goods and services available on a free market and seek to take advantage of market conditions in order to profit. This helped me comprehend that the whole idea behind capitalism is that each individual makes their own version of a business and makes their specialized goods available to the free market and sells them. The only catch is, each business has to compete with rival businesses with similar goods and therefore, prices decrease and the only way to make profit is to establish a business with the cheapest prices out of all the competition, but also at the same time have quality goods to make the most profit.

                In addition to this, I learned that capitalism definitely facilitated trade for Europe and increased its relations with distant lands like Russia, which in turn, boosted the economy. When it comes to how this system fit in with the rest of society, this is what I extracted from the book. It seemed that the government definitely favored this system more than the church did because it conflicted with religion by promoting greedy behavior and wrong morals, leading to violent social unrest from those who did not comply with capitalism. Also, it seemed like this system used the lower classes of serfs and peasants to build its profit and prestige. It used the advantage of having “cheap labor” to do all the work behind the scenes; so by underpaying these individuals, there was less money being wasted on the actual making of the product, resulting in higher revenues for the businesses.