[aninhumer]

>Capitalism has already been around forever :)

Only if you define it in a way which is so loose as to be tautological.

There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history, and it wasn't until relatively recently that any of them could really be described as "Capitalism".

[Symmetry]

Not literally forever but you could describe ships bought by private money for private profit by merchants in ancient Rome as capitalism. Capitalism is, fundamentally, the private ownership of the means for production with the owners receiving the fruits of that production directly and the workers being compensated by that owner, and the capitalists using their excess profits to create more means of production. I'm not sure how you could define capitalism such that it includes everything we describe as capitalist in the modern world while excluding Roman merchants.

Until recently capitalism has been a small fraction of production but it's existed much longer.

[edblarney]

"There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history"

If you have currency, banking, credit, merchants raising capital, private property protections, rule of law, labour at some cost - towards projects ... then it's basically capitalism.

The Romans had all of that to lesser or greater degree.

There are no examples of centrally planned economies working out on any scale.

Communism is a completely dead idea, it's an effete academic concept only. That game is over.