[larsiusprime]

"capitalism" as casually used can be broken down into a bunch of discrete, sometimes contradictory concepts, here's just a few off the top of my head:

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1. "CAPITAL"-ism with a capital "C": the policy that when labor and capital do something together, capital should get the bigger share of the return.

2. "Laissez-faire": a market that has as little regulation from the government as possible.

3. "Free market": a market that is generally untainted by what are considered "artificial" external manipulations, such as price-fixing, etc, that prevent it from reaching a natural equilibrium.

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These sometimes contradict. For instance, pure laissez-faire can easily lead to monopolies, which hinders the ability of the "free market" value. Also, it's not clear at all that "CAPITAL"-ism naturally follows from either 2 or 3.

And even when you break it into these concepts there's still plenty of room for interpretation.

[vegancap]

I guess what I was referring to by 'capitalism' was actually 'free-market' by that list. I should've been more concise. The author was attacking 'capitalism' as a whole, so I wanted to refute his general argument against market-oriented economies

[larsiusprime]

Yeah it's a huge mess when people don't define their terms.