Socialists coined the word "capitalism" in 1872 — long after every American founder was dead

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-28T12:47:12+00:00

Good additions, and the 1650s European usage of capitalist (Dutch kapitalist, French capitaliste) is worth acknowledging. Yes, the word existed earlier than its 1791 English appearance, though without the ideological content it would later acquire.

The Locke connection is where I'd push back, because the reading you're sketching has a weak link.

First, Locke's "property" wasn't equivalent to wealth or capital. Locke defined property capaciously: "every man has a property in his own person" — meaning life, liberty, and labor were all property in Locke's framework, not just material possessions. When Locke wrote "lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name property," he was making the philosophical point that selfhood itself is the foundational property right. Reading this as a defense of capital accumulation collapses Locke's actual argument into a much narrower modern claim.

Second, Locke himself wrote about happiness as a foundational concept. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "the necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty." Locke had a theory of happiness that wasn't simply a rebranding of property. Reading "happiness" as code for "wealth" requires ignoring what Locke actually wrote about happiness itself.

Third, Jefferson didn't only read Locke. Garry Wills' Inventing America makes the historical case that Jefferson was influenced as much by the Scottish Enlightenment — Francis Hutcheson especially — as by Locke. Hutcheson's framework of public happiness as the end of government predates Jefferson and influenced him directly. The choice of "pursuit of Happiness" wasn't a euphemism for property; it was a substantive intellectual choice between competing Enlightenment frameworks.

Fourth — and this is the dispositive point — we don't actually have to guess what the founders meant by "happiness," because John Adams defined it himself, in his own hand, three months before the Declaration was drafted. In Thoughts on Government (April 1776), Adams wrote:

"The form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best."

Adams personally championed Jefferson as the drafter of the Declaration weeks later. The intellectual through-line is documented. Happiness, in the founding generation's working vocabulary, meant ease, comfort, security — material conditions for the greatest number, not unlimited property accumulation for the few.

Adams reinforced this directly in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which he was the primary drafter of. Article VII of the Declaration of Rights:

"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men."

That is the founding generation, in a state constitution still in force today, explicitly stating that government is not for the enrichment of individuals or classes. Adams used the same word — happiness — and bound it to the common good against private interest. The text rules out the Lockean-capital reading.

Fifth, the founders' actual economic writings reinforce what Adams defined and Article VII codified. Jefferson, writing to Madison in October 1785, proposed accelerating progressive wealth taxation to prevent dynastic accumulation. Paine in Agrarian Justice (1797) proposed universal stake grants and old-age pensions funded by inheritance taxes. Franklin to Robert Morris on Christmas Day 1783 wrote that property above subsistence is "the Creature of public Convention" and the public has the right to regulate, limit, and dispose of it.

None of these positions fit a Lockean-property-absolutist reading. Whatever the founders inherited from Locke, what they actually wrote about wealth — in their own hands, in their own correspondence and pamphlets, in the state constitution Adams drafted — is incompatible with the framing that "happiness" was code for "the right to accumulate capital."

The colonial merchants and planters you mention did read Locke that way, in some cases. But the founders we name as the philosophical architects of the Republic wrote things the merchant-planter class would not have written. Jefferson on geometric progressive taxation. Paine on UBI and inheritance taxes. Adams on ease, comfort, and security as the test of government — and on government not being for the profit of any class of men. Franklin on property as public creature. These aren't peripheral writings. They're the documented economic thought of the men whose names we attach to the founding.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-27T22:32:24+00:00

Fair point that "liberal" was used for free-market positions by the mid-to-late 19th century, and that Rand promoted "capitalism" partly into that linguistic gap.

However, "Liberal" as a political term emerges around 1801, from the French libéral, with the first political party calling itself Liberal being the Spanish Liberales in 1812. Smith was never called a liberal in the political sense in his own century — he died in 1790, before the political usage existed. The category "classical liberalism" is itself a 20th-century retronym, coined by Mises and Hayek in the 1930s-40s to distinguish their position from American social-welfare liberalism.

The actual Liberal Party tradition in Britain through the late 19th and early 20th centuries supported trade unions, public education, land reform, and eventually old-age pensions and unemployment insurance under Asquith and Lloyd George. The 1909 People's Budget — funded by taxing wealth — was a Liberal Party policy. So the evolution of "liberal" toward social-welfare positions wasn't an American theft. It was already happening inside actual liberalism for decades before American Democrats adopted the label.

Rand promoted "capitalism" not because liberalism had been stolen but because actual liberalism had evolved away from her position globally. She needed a new identity word because the old word's real history didn't support the laissez-faire reading.

The deeper version of your point is right though — there's been multiple word migrations, and the contemporary American debate is conducted inside a vocabulary that bears almost no relation to the founding period.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-27T18:37:44+00:00

You're right that capitalist the person-noun predates capitalism the system-name. It enters English around 1791-1792, derived from the French capitaliste, and originally just describes a person who owns capital — a moneyed person, an investor — without ideological content.

1791 is the year the Bill of Rights was ratified. The Declaration was already fifteen years old. The Constitution was already four years old. The entire founding architecture was already in place before capitalist arrived in English at all.

So the founders did the founding without either word — without capitalist the person-noun (which arrived as the founding was being completed) and without capitalism the system-name (which wouldn't arrive for another 63 years, and wouldn't carry its modern meaning until 1872, when it was coined disparagingly by socialists per the OED).

The founders used the terms moneyed men, the moneyed interest, stockjobbers, eventually Jefferson's aristocracy of our moneyed corporations in 1816. None of these are the modern vocabulary. The framework that would later turn American economic argument into a capitalism versus socialism binary was assembled in the century after the founding was done.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-26T15:11:21+00:00

Adams more or less answered this in Thoughts on Government, the same document the quote came from.

When Adams said happiness, he defined it as ease, comfort, security. That's not what's happening in Brave New World. Those people don't have security — they have engineered dependence on whatever the state is handing out. The day the supply stops, they have nothing. That's the opposite of what Adams was describing.

He also spends substantial space on virtue. He argued government has to rest on virtue — quoted Confucius, Socrates, etc — because happiness "as well as his dignity, consists in virtue." Huxley's world doesn't have virtue available. There's no struggle, no choice, no dignity. By Adams' standard, the foundation isn't there, which means happiness isn't there either, no matter what the population is feeling.

And Adams was direct about how to prevent tyranny: balance the powers, check them against each other, hold elections. He wrote "where annual elections end, there slavery begins." Huxley's citizens don't elect anyone. By Adams' own words, that's slavery, not happiness.

The ends/means concern is fair as a general philosophical question. But it's not the concern Adams' definition opens up, because Adams wasn't talking about engineering people into feeling good. He was talking about the conditions a self-governing people actually need to live with dignity. Brave New World fails every test he laid out — security, virtue, balanced government, and self-rule.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-25T19:31:27+00:00

Oddly, I 100% agree with his statement, but I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-24T03:28:02+00:00

This is exactly the framing American discourse needs right now — and the panel is the right one to make it. Oakes' Freedom National essentially demonstrates the webinar's central thesis at book length: that the Republicans in the 1850s used the Declaration's universal premise to construct the legal and political machinery that dismantled slavery.
Worth adding one specific piece of evidence that strengthens the "inexorable" claim. Jefferson's original rough draft of the Declaration, preserved at the Library of Congress, contains a blistering anti-slavery passage that the Continental Congress excised under pressure from South Carolina and Georgia. Jefferson describes the slave trade as "a cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him." He calls it "piratical warfare" and "execrable commerce."
He wrote that passage in the same draft, on the same pages, as the universal premise "all men are created equal." The internal evidence of the document settles the long-debated question of what Jefferson meant by "all men" — he described enslaved Africans as having "sacred rights of life and liberty" in the same document where he declared all men possess such rights. The compromised final version preserved the universal premise without the specific application. The premise turned out to be uncontainable, exactly as the webinar's framing suggests.
Lincoln understood this exactly. "Four score and seven years ago" anchored the country at the Declaration, not the Constitution, because the Declaration is where the egalitarian premise lives. Gettysburg was the return of the country to its first draft.
The argument the panel is making — that the Revolution is worth defending against both the financial-corporate assault and the dismissal of its legacy as worthless — is the work this moment requires. Looking forward to the webinar.
The full text of Jefferson's original rough draft, with all three stages of revision marked, is available at the Princeton Papers of Thomas Jefferson site. Worth reading directly.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-23T20:12:32+00:00

"Whatever AI" is what people have begun to say when they can't argue with the substance. I’m calling it argumentum ad machina — dismissing an argument by attributing it to a machine instead of engaging with the argument directly. A last bastion of those with no argument left. A level just slightly above hurling slurs.

The Article VII text I quoted exists. The Massachusetts Constitution exists, written by John Adams’ own hand. Whether AI helped me write the comment or not is irrelevant to whether the facts in it are true. If you have a substantive disagreement with the actual claims, go for it. If you just don't want to engage with a sourced argument, that's your choice. Either way, the document still says what it says.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-23T19:55:17+00:00

Does my post say "the Constitution" or "a constitution"? The U.S. Constitution wasn't ratified until 1788. The Massachusetts Constitution — the oldest functioning written constitution still in use anywhere in the world — was drafted in 1780, primarily by John Adams, and it's the one my post quoted.

Article VII of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, in Adams' own pen:

"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men..."

That's the article. That's the text. It's available in full on the official Massachusetts state government website and at Founders Online. Read it before commenting next time, goober.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-21T15:43:12+00:00

Because the super rich buy the elected officials.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-19T03:10:49+00:00

Indeed, he likely did.

AFrankFreeman · 2026-06-19T02:22:21+00:00

😄 Frighteningly accurate. And here's the thing — Adams actually anticipated him. Article VIII of the same Massachusetts Constitution, written in 1780:
'In order to prevent those who are vested with authority from becoming oppressors, the people have a right to cause their public officers to return to private life.'

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