History helps us understand why capitalism is misunderstood and misrepresented and why it is ignored or rejected by so many.
As illustrated by history, individualism as a political ideology and its social system ally capitalism represent a break with thousands of years of collectivist and statist traditions. If we represent 6000 years of organized civilization as a year, John Locke appears on the scene around December 10, and the United States is founded a week later. If we extend the timeline, admittedly somewhat arbitrarily, to 100,000 years of semi-organized tribal life, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is published in the afternoon of December 30, and the United States is founded just before dawn on New Year’s Eve. In this perspective, the discoveries of individualism and capitalism have just appeared on the scene. It is not surprising that they are misunderstood, looked upon as a threat to the age-old collectivist/statist dominance, and met with resistance.
Furthermore, as we will see shortly, capitalism as a social system has so far not been consistently implemented anywhere. This means that champions of the proposed new capitalist system have few comprehensive concretes to point to, while detractors find ammunition in an abundance of failed welfare statist experiments that they (falsely) blame on capitalism.
Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right 