- 1資本主義
Capitalism is a way of running an economy in which private people and companies own the shops, factories, land, and tools, and they try to make a profit. What gets made, and what it costs, is mostly decided by buying and selling — by customers choosing, and by firms competing — rather than by the government telling every workshop what to produce. Capital here is the money and the things you own that can make more money, not a city and not a big letter.
People use the word as a calm description, and they also use it as praise or as an attack, depending on who is talking. Some hear freedom and growth; others hear and greed. Though actually, no country is “pure” capitalism. Every real place mixes private business with taxes, public schools, roads, hospitals, and rules about safety and pay. So the word names a leaning and a set of ideas, not a single switch that a nation either has or does not have. A family shop that keeps its profit after costs is a small picture of it; so is a huge company selling phones around the world.
From the word’s history
From French capitalisme; capital + -ism. First used in English by Thackeray (1854–55).
借自法文 capitalisme；就是 capital 加上 -ism。
組成From French capitalisme, from capital + -isme. Capital goes back to Latin capitālis, from caput (“head”).
同家族的字
- capitalthe money and assets a business owns; capitalism is the system built around private capital
- capitalista person who owns capital, or someone who supports that system
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
capitalismnoun/ˈkapɪt(ə)lɪz(ə)m/
- 1
economicsgovernmentpoliticsA socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.
- What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.
- The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc., etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
- 2
economicsgovernmentpoliticsA socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.
- 3
economic-liberalismeconomicsgovernmentA socio-economic system based on private ownership of resources, and capital and their exploitation for profit.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。