it's an interesting culture inculcation process. As a child with no concept of how money works, you go from a world where food and drinks magically appear, to a world where you're a part of the system. There’s this divide as the drinking age is 21, but people attend college starting at around age 18. Far from everyone goes to college in the US, but around 18 is when, legally, kids turn into adults. So then there's this problem where you can't go to any of the legal government-regulated bars nearby, but you also now, suddenly, have the freedom to do anything you want because for most Americans, this is the first time they're living out from under their parents reign. So you have this group, A, with their money, who want product B (alcohol), and only group C (21+ aged people) can purchase it. If the drinking age was, say, 16, culturally, it would be easier to just have and expect people to bring a six pack of beer on their way over. But since it's restricted to age 21+, trying to acquire alcohol becomes a whole thing.
Alright, so you're 18, you're in college, and it's a Friday night, what're you gonna get up to? You're still a raging mess of hormones from puberty and want to seek out people you find sexually interesting, and it turns out alcohol is a social lubricant. But you can't just go to the store and buy some alcohol, so you have figure out something else. You can try and have fun without alcohol (which, to the future alcoholics out there: this entirely possible!), or you can figure out a way to acquire some. You can steal it which then they can't check your id, you can try and fake the system with a fake id (which needs to be created or purchased). You can try to get someone you know or a stranger to buy you some, and give them a generous service fee. Or you can simply attend a house party where there is underage drinking where you have to know somebody to get in, but you just have to show up and give them money (for a red Solo cup). But therin lies the indoctrination into capitalism because if you organize and source a keg of beer for, say, a nice round $100 to make the math easier, it has 165 cups of beer. If you sell a cup of beer of $5, 165*$5-$100 for the keg = $725. Which isn't a ton of money split out amongst all participants, but once you put that into a calculator, or better yet, a Google Sheet, then you're hooked.
But that wasn't your question. The US was less capitalist before the Internet. Which is funny, because the Internet was supposed to break down walls and eliminate unnecessary middlemen. It might just be a timing thing, though. There is a late-stage private equity version of capitalism that seems more prevalent as of late. Where "late" is defined as since, I don't know, 1920. The particular part I'm thinking of is when grocery stores became chains and those chains had enough excess revenue that they hired psychologists to optimize the store layout to get people to buy more shit. I don't know anyone who thinks that money isn't useful, but it's the concentration of it that has become problematic. That whole "enshittification" thing is borne out of that. Something making $1 million / year being "not interesting to VC firms" comes out of that.
If we weren't capitalist, what would the theme be?
In lieu of cash, the theme would be bring something to the party to make the party better. Mostly alcohol, but also interesting people, music, trinkets; some other token of appreciation and something to engage people with. But because of the above described process, "just show up with cash" is the mindset for many Americans (including me, when I can't help it!). It's moved to digital, like Venmo/Cash.app/Zelle these days, and apparently the newest generation isn't drinking as much, so we'll have to see where it all goes though.
