Hi! Thanks for your response! It's food for thought. How would you distinguish your description of Capitalism from a minimalistic description of Communism? Or from a lonely hermetic lifestyle? I guess I was implicitly including "trade" as part of the description, but maybe that's incorrect?


Perhaps plain scarcity is not enough? I can imagine that if something is uniformly scarce, e.g.: pink-and-blue single-seater flying saucers are all uniformly unavailable, obviously they can't be traded. Nor would that fact encourage the trade of any other items.

Maybe scarcity also has to be relative?
E.g.: everyone might stockpile food for the winter, but because winter occurs at different times of the year and with different types of food becoming scarce depending on where you live, this might make it easier and more convenient to trade instead of just stockpiling?