> Your argument is not with profit but with human nature
As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?
Long distance trade and traveling merchants date back into the Bronze Age at least, and salt was probably traded in Europe during the Stone Age.
These transactions did not use money, but their basics do not differ much from contemporary trade - including the fact that trade centers and highly connected individuals could become very, very rich, almost unfathomably so when compared to their contemporaries.
Capitalism is the switch from control of land and profit/rent earned from land towards control of non-real-estate capital and profit/rent earned from capital, simply because with the increase of non-land wealth, land became relatively a bit less important. The profit motivation has been human nature already in ancient Babylon and probably as long as homo sapiens has existed.
As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?