[WalterBright]

I missed the railroads, steel industries, chip manufacturers, iphones, etc. that were looted from those people?

BTW, studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians shows they worked hard and suffered from periodic famines, as well as a lot of violence.

[Apocryphon]

Therein lies the commonality between all economic systems: where there are people, there is the taking.

Industries tend to require raw materials, which many times are located in or around land.

[WalterBright]

Free markets are not built around taking. They are built around exchanging.

[Apocryphon]

Ah, the starry-eyed utopianism. Marxists and Objectivists are truly funhouse mirror images; they may look completely different from one another, but both belong at the carnival.

[t-3]

Free markets are a ideal which has never been achieved, much like socialism. There is, and never has been, a market without regulation, and with only voluntary participation and without stolen goods being exchanged.

[KingMob]

Those things weren't looted from the natives.

But the profits were looted from the workers who actually built all that stuff.

Capitalists aren't the ones hammering in steel spikes or wearing clean-room fab suits.