> Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got cuneiform tablets describing markets going back 5000+ years. Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy.
A market economy is one where resources (commodities, labour, services) are distributed primarily via the pricing mechanism, prices can be set freely by market participants and the market is generally open. It isn't merely an economy where markets exist.
Your examples were not market economies. They heavily restricted market access through guilds, hereditary jobs, serfdom, feudal law and trading licenses. They fixed prices through price edicts and decrees. On top of that, the majority of the population were subsistence farmers who also made most of their tools themselves. This means that the vast majority of resources were not traded in a market.
> That too is relatively new. Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.
Really? You're just going to state this as a fact without any backing at all?
A market economy is one where resources (commodities, labour, services) are distributed primarily via the pricing mechanism, prices can be set freely by market participants and the market is generally open. It isn't merely an economy where markets exist.
Your examples were not market economies. They heavily restricted market access through guilds, hereditary jobs, serfdom, feudal law and trading licenses. They fixed prices through price edicts and decrees. On top of that, the majority of the population were subsistence farmers who also made most of their tools themselves. This means that the vast majority of resources were not traded in a market.
> That too is relatively new. Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.
Really? You're just going to state this as a fact without any backing at all?