In economics, a capitalist is someone who owns capital, presumably within the economic system of capitalism.
Not all usages of the word assume actual ownership of capital. Some philosophers and political theorists, such as Ayn Rand and David Friedman, use "capitalist" to mean "an advocate of capitalism." Historically, some governments (such as, most famously, the Soviet Union) used "capitalists" as a pejorative blanket term in state-sponsored propaganda to refer to the governments of the Western Hemisphere and their supporters.
Pre-modern economies (those existing before the industrial revolution) are more difficult to analyze by today's standards, but a number of them, particularly those of hydraulic empires, may be seen as having been centrally planned as well.
There is a Trotskyist theory of permanent arms economy, put forward by Michael Kidron, which leads on from the contention that war and accompanying industrialisation is a continuing feature of capitalist states and that central planning and other features of the war economy are ever present.
A palace economy may be considered as a subsistence economy augmented with elements of command economy.
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