[WalterBright]

> Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

That's Marx's explanation, all right.

What free markets are, is when people freely decide to make transactions with each other, without using force or fraud.

The simplest case is you have an apple tree, I have an orange tree. You have too many apples, and no oranges. I have the reverse problem. We trade. We are both better off. I exploit you for apples, you exploit me for oranges.

[perl4ever]

But we don't "have" trees. Owning a tree is dependent on a highly abstract concept of ownership, enforced by an organized state that monopolizes the use of force.

Saying a transaction is without force or fraud is only begging the question. If it is legal, and someone thinks it is illegitimate, then it logically involves both fraud and force from their perspective. It was fraud to write the rules down, and it is force to use guns to make people comply.

It's too easy to defend "free markets" while ignoring that the usual description is circular.

[WalterBright]

It's a little too easy to dismiss arguments by trying to redirect it into a debate about what words mean.

You and I both know what the terms mean.

[diordiderot]

I don't think that's a fair assessment.

You absolutely have hidden assumptions about what the words mean. We all do.

Be open minded towards other interpretations you may take for granted.

[rjbwork]

It's also a little too easy to avoid arguments you find inconvenient by refusing to examine the assumptions that underpin the position you put forth.

[WalterBright]

Sorry, I've been down the tiresome path of what does "is" mean too many times. You can explore it if you like.

[perl4ever]

From https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/john-locke-justificat...

'"He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when he pickt them up?"

Locke answered these questions by selecting the last of these options. The acorns became the private property of the owner when he picked them up, for it was in the gathering that labor was first expended. "That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right."'

I'm not endorsing or dismissing this, but notice how it conflicts with ownership of the tree.

[DarylZero]

Free markets are a game with rules set by the government. "Without using force or fraud" just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government. It's a very deceptive way to describe rule-following. It implies a very idealistic, unrealistic vision of what those rules are and how they are made.

The people who benefit most from the rules control the system, making sure rules don't change.

The benefit they receive from the rules is to be in a parasitic, extractive, predatory relationship to most of humanity.

Why not use "force or fraud" to liberate yourself from predatory relations?

[WalterBright]

> just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government

You can make up your own definitions of things as you like. It's a common rhetorical device to divert a conversation into a swamp. Me, I'll stick to commonly understood meanings.

[quantum_solanum]

that's literally YOUR own definition, as you said elsewhere in the thread

> Free markets require a working police and justice system

[WalterBright]

You're greatly misinterpreting what I wrote. The government is needed to implement a free market. The government does not define a free market.

[DarylZero]

> The government does not define a free market

Complete fantasy.

[hoseja]

Who picked the apples and oranges?

[rjbwork]

You're still comingling the concepts of capitalism and markets. I actually 100% agree with your entire post (as a description, anyway, not as an ideal or with respect to the conceptual foundations of property rights), but is in no way a refutation of what I said or what Marx said. It's somewhat tangential entirely, really.

EDIT: Also, I wouldn't use the word "exploit" in such a simple descriptor of commerce.