Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism.
So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government.
That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them.
Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take.
The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
Only if you've redefined "capitalism" to mean "any economic system including individual/institutional holdings and trade", in which case you've successfully and retroactively redefined all economies ever as having been capitalistic. A net that catches every fish names none.
"A net that catches every fish names none" is an interesting turn of phrase. Does it come from somewhere? Nets don't usually name things; the net that catches only 2 fishes also doesn't name them.
No, my brain just mixed metaphors stupidly. It just sounds interesting because it alliterates, which is also by accident.
I was thinking about how tuna fishermen cast dragnets that often catch many other things, up to and including sharks and dolphins. Hence, you couldn't really call such a net a "tuna net", since it more just catches tuna by coincidence of catching everything even remotely fish-shaped.
I think you missed the "free" part of the definition. The trade between the North Korean death camp guard and a prisoner is between individuals but that doesn't make it capitalistic (because of that "free" part being absent).
I don't think a free market and capitalism are exactly the same thing. Mostly, I think there should be some kind of limitation on ownership (especially of large entities), since with ownership comes social responsibility. Maybe we should just put an end to the limitations on liability for people who own a company.
Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government.
That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them.
Do I have that about right?