No, the problem isn't capitalism

INTRO

During the general state of births in Italy Pope Francisco made a great speech on the birth rate problem that we are currently facing, but then he gave as one of the reasoning for this issue, the fact that it's the free markets fault that prices of both renting and buying houses are too high, which leads to people not reproducing because of the costs. Before understanding if thats really the case, let's see what history can tell us.

HISTORY

Since ancient times we searched for methods to exchange goods and services in the most efficent way possible. As time passed we discarded many of them, from islands where transactions were conducted with giant rocks to African countries using peanuts. These two examples that I just mentioned had a very simular ending where foreigners who came from countries that were much richer of those resources, came to enrich themselfes and left those societis to their collapses. With time though we found the best currency which was gold, but a problem remained, humanitys greed. The best example of this is the Roman empire, even though it collapsed for various reasons (obviously), one of them was the devaluation of their coins time and time again, by decreasing the gold contained in them. But for a long time gold remained the best currency, until the discovery of America which led to some problems because of the difficulty of carrying out long distance transactions (Actually there already were but in a minor way), this led to the creation of banknotes exchangeable for gold and consequently banks who could facilitate these exchanges and the long distance transactions. Obviously the human factor continues to be a problem in this period, more then once banknotes have been printed over the quantity of gold available, for various reasons like sustaining a longer war.

1914

1914 is the beggining of the first world war but it's also the moment we seriously start adopting the FIAT monetary system, which is a model not based on the gurantee of having an underlying resource backing the currency but one artificially handled by a goverment or a central bank, this allows them to control the amount of money based on the economic situation. Their reason for doing this was to sustain a longer war, obviously the new war machines created in those years made it a longer war than usual, but it was especially inflationing their currency that allowed for a war of attrition. Some citizen opposed to it, they knew what was happening, but the revolts were suppresed and in the end they were forced to bring their gold to their government in exchange for the currency of the state they where in. This happened in most of the European countries between 14' and 39' but not in the USA, where we have to wait till 1970 for them to abandon the gold standard.

1929

But don't think that the USA didn't make questionable moves in the meantime, in fact the great depression of 1929 which was caused by various factors, including though the rise in interest rates in 27' by the FED (control of the economy), but the blame was given to the free market (Sounds familiar?). And then in 33' American citizens gold was confiscated to then decide, the next year, to arbitrary raise golds price of 10$ and consequently print more banknotes. So in reality the US had full control on golds supply between 33' and 70'.

MARX

Before we get to todays time we must understand how the FIAT monetary system was born, well, it might stun you but even though there have been some changes to it. It is based on Marxs economic theory (actually he expands on a theory of someone else before him), in fact even though many don't know this we live in a mixed economy not in a capitalistic one. Marx was a centralist, great discussions on giving the power to the people but when it came to handling what is probably the most important thing for a functioning society, he preffered concetrating the control of it to a central authority composed by a restricted number of people. I sugget you read it for yourselves, he was already talking of financial cycles (boom & bust) artificially handled by a central bank.

TODAY

At this point every country has its own FIAT system or inherits another countrys currency (USD, EURO, YEN...), it isn't convenient to change model because you become vulnerable to attacks since you can't sustain a long war and in the short term innovation actually moves at a slower pace. Ask it to Gheddafi (you can't...), even though many don't know it, Hillary Clintons leaked emails clearly show that the real reason Lybia got destroyed...ehm...peace and democracy were exported, was because Gheddafi wanted to create a gold backed currency for the entire African continent. And this bring us to the Pope who like in 1929 and in many other occasions in the last hundred and more years blamed the free market for something that was created by too much regulation on the market, to give politician the power to regulate it even more.

CONCLUSIONS

Well yes, reality is that most of the people either are blind or decides not to watch, big part of the capitalists are happy because they think they live in capitalism and almost all communists/socialists is angry at the very system their own idle created (Marx could only enjoy seeing that not only we have a central bank per state we have one for many states at the same time, whats more centralized than that?!?). Even though we could go and look at all the regulations that have been imposed to the Italian real estate market in the past years, we don't have to because the problem stands at the beginning of it all, our monetary system isn't free. As a matter of fact one of the definition of capitalism and in my opinion the most important one is: "A free market is based on a free monetary system". Obviously I'm not suggesting that the solution is total anarchy, what I'm saying is that if we really want to live in a free and democratic world, let us start by making the currency that we use free and only after we did that, we can talk about which industries need regulations and which don't. This doesn't mean that gold is the right currency, the people over time will find or even create freely, the right currency to exchange goods and services... who knows, it might be BITCOIN...