[fennecfoxen]

Eh. There's one thing where people are able to purchase, own, and maintain capital, and make money off its output. There's another thing that's about using the coercive force of the state to force people to send you resources that they wouldn't if they were free to do as they pleased. It's meaningful to refer to the former as "capitalism" and call the latter something more like "fascism". It's also quite meaningful to discuss the discuss the manner in which they interact and the impurity of extant capitalist systems.

But the big people in charge (or at least with connections) forcing the little people to send them resources? That's a pattern far older than the notion of capital investments, and dates back to our early primate days, before our most basic notions of investing in the future through things like, say, agriculture. So I say it's pretty much orthogonal to capitalism.

[nickff]

>"But the big people in charge (or at least with connections) forcing the little people to send them resources?"

This sounds like feudalism to me, though I know the word has negative connotations, and is now associated only with the distant past.