The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse.
I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals.
The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in which economic systems of the industrialized world have made a hard turn against the whole ethos of voluntarism in the commercial sector.
Still, let’s pretend we can agree on a stable description of a capitalist economy. Let’s call it the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning.
It is, ideally, the economic system of a society of consent.
This is obviously an ideal type. So described, it is inseparable from freedom as such and forbids state planning, expropriation, and legal privileges for some over others. How does the status quo match up against that? In uncountable ways, our economic systems utterly fail the test, with all the results that one would expect.
What follows is a short list of all the ways in which the US system does not comport with some ideal type of capitalistic marketplace.
Hellbound and Down 