For instance, I think the idea of free software (RMS style) really is at odds with capitalism; but so what? This is not a good reason to agree or disagree with the idea.
At the level of globally integrated economies, I think the gold standard has been pretty well proven to be disastrous. It especially doesn't deal well with trade imbalances that unwind suddenly. The trouble you see in the Euro area can be seen as a microcosm of what a gold standard is like; countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain don't control their money supply - more or less, it's like gold - so they're caught in an extremely painful bind, when what would be best for them is to devalue their currency some. Instead, they're having to struggle under huge debt burdens, and some might have to default, or leave the Euro (i.e. by analogy leave the gold standard).
Those things are perfectly compatible with democracy but completely incompatible with capitalism. An inherent idea to capitalism is the protection of individual freedom which those things clearly violate in some way or another. On the other hand, those things are perfectly compatible with democracy given that 51% of the population are OK with it. In fact, what nobody believes in is democracy (that's why most democratic countries have a constitution).
Etc., etc. Free markets are amoral machines that discover price levels appropriate to supply and demand through transactions. They are not intrinsically good or bad; it is in the transactions that make them up that moral judgement comes in. But if the market is truly free, then there will be no limit on the kinds of transactions.
Hence, slavery not being compatible with capitalism is a fact, not a distortion of the free market nor a mere opinion.
I'm not making a "meat is murder" argument. I'm just pointing out that pretty much any conceivable capitalist system defines cows and horses to be property, not people. One can envision a capitalist system which does the same for slaves and assassination victims.
I.e., by tweaking the definition of "person" or "market participant", you can get all sorts of odd results.
(That said, capitalist advocates have never made such arguments, as far as I'm aware. Most early supply&demand types were abolitionists, and the phrase "the dismal science" was coined by a pro-slavery advocate.
Edit: Why the hell am I being down voted here?
As for your argument wrt gold, it's inconclusive to say the least. Specifically, PIIGS has failed not because they can't expand their money supply at will now, but because they could (and very much did) extend their money supply before (using ECB as a source of cheap money, which would be impossible on gold standard).
But that's a century old debate, Austrian school has made their very convincing case about fiat money w/ goverment controlled supply causing business cycles in, what, 1912? Something like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery etc.
I'm not familiar with the situation in all PIIGS, mostly just Ireland (I'm Irish). The money came from British, German, French banks, over the course of a decade. ECB was the source of emergency financing when the bubble collapsed; i.e. you have your order of events backwards.
The money came from British (banks, sponsored by artificially expanded money supply of BoE), German, French banks (sponsored by artificially expanded money supply of ECB), etc. I've got my order exactly correct. Then, when the crisis hit, more money come from ECB. It's a little surprise that the problem caused by excess money is not exactly fixed (in PIIGS) by more excess money.
Seriously, it's ABCT 101.
Re your selective fitting of crisis to monetary theory, I'm not going to comment; there are too many factors at work to be reductive about it.
Yes -- but by definition only if agreed upon mutually voluntarily.
But you're probably still right when saying that (almost) "nobody wants" that.
The generally accepted term for everything, including murder and conspiracy to murder, being legal is "anarchy" and if people still have free markets in this anarchy thats generally referred to as "anarcho-capitalism". Though nothing about having a free market says that murder is legal and probably says that forcing another person to work for you using the threat of violence is illegal. I can certainly see arguing that a free market implies legal prostitution, however, since unmarried sex is legal in most places.
EDIT: And as to Capitalism, well to quote Wikipedia: "There is no consensus on the precise definition of capitalism, nor how the term should be used as an historical category."
People arguing for free trade are generally arguing for a particularly scoped subset of "free" trade, but they take as a relatively unexamined assumption that free trade is inherently good. Usually, there is some trade in particular that they would like to pursue, and they fight laws that inhibit it using free trade as a rallying cry, as if it were a self-evident justification. My point is that free trade by itself is not intrinsically desirable, and that we do in fact want all sorts of limits on what people are free to trade in.
As a private owner of a "production" factory, you have control over your products, and through this control you gain profit.
Contrast this with communism, which views private control over things which are needed by the public (like food) as a bad idea because the person in charge gets to limit the freedom of others (or some idea similar to that).
Free Software is similar in this regard: software is ubiquitous, and so it's unethical (according to the philosophy of the FSF) to let it be under the control of corporations. Apple has complete control over iPhones, and they decide what you can and cannot do with it: this is "evil", according to FSF's philosophy.
From a purely capitalistic point of view: a software developer gets an incentive to create and evolve software if it was closed source and hard to crack so that he could sell it and get profit. From a market perspective, this is more efficient.
But, from RMS's perspective, market efficiency shouldn't matter here because the act of putting artificial restriction on software usage is unethical.
While I don't agree with RMS about this thing being necessarily unethical in and of itself; I do find his arguments very compelling, and I'm inclined to say that it's best if one was able to make money doing open source. However, I think one has to be realistic, and in reality developers need money, and so it's ok to sell closed apps (as in iPhone apps, or SaaS webapps like 37signals).
As you can see, my position doesn't have anything to do with capitalism as an ideology.
Copyright law legally prevents you from including someone else's software in your work, unless you get permission. The GPL grants you that permission so long as you follow the terms of the license. In other words, it isn't "your products", it's a joint product, and the other contributor wants a say on how the joint product is delivered.
If your product doesn't use anyone else's license, then the FSF does say that it's morally reprehensible to not have free software, but they stay well within copyright law to change the system from within.
Have you considered that perhaps it's copyright's temporary monopoly grant which is "at odds with certain capitalistic ideas"? After all, copyright in US law comes from promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not making profit.
I've already responded to this in another comment.
The GPL doesn't "simply grant you this right". FSF think this right is essential and that it's unethical to not grant this right. If RMS simply wanted to give you a permission, he could've used a variation of the BSD/MIT licenses.
> but they stay well within copyright law to change the system from within.
But they still think the system is wrong.
> Have you considered that perhaps it's copyright's temporary monopoly grant which is "at odds with certain capitalistic ideas"?
I've heard this argument, and I don't think it's very compelling, but really what's the point? Why should anyone feel compelled to make such an argument? As if capitalism is the religion of the state, and every ideology must be compatible with it, or else!! So you have to go around and make these interpretation about what "true" capitalism is all about.
With that in mind I think you can see how I interpreted your comment to mean that the legal expression of free software ideology embedded in the GPL, which depends on current strong copyright law, is at odds with capitalism. If that were the case then strong copyright is at odds with capitalism.
I personally can consider a set of laws in which distributed software must be distributed as free software. I agree that such would be a limitation of the sorts of economics decisions you can make. As such, I can agree that it would be against "certain capitalistic ideas."
However, since we (as a general culture) agree that Mr. Factory Owner may not employ child labor, may not have slaves, may not dump toxic wastes in the water system, must have a safe working environment, and so on, we are already at a point where we (as a culture) agree that "certain capitalistic ideas" are either morally toxic or at least subject to trajedy of the commons oversight.
Since we (as a culture) don't have, and don't want to have, a "purely capitalistic point of view", arguments grounded in that premise are at heart faulty.
So what? People were and are always free to transact business in any way that they would like, but the coin of the realm that you are required to accept and pay taxes with is/was gold. That doesn't mean that I can't exchange a few bushels of wheat for a goat. Or some coupons for car washes for a sandwich. Or some bitcoin for a webhosting, or whatever you buy with bitcoin.
Bitcoin is only against capitalism in the sense that nobody is going to make a significant amount of money from it.
This will mean that once I open up a shop, I have to accept it as well, or I'll lose sales. Of course, in theory, nobody would force me to accept Bitcoins, but so is the case today - nobody forces me to use Dollars, or PayPal.
Actually, if you're in the US, you do have to use dollars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar.
You and I can have a contract where I buy a cow from you today in exchange for an iPod next week, that's a valid contract. But if I cannot produce the iPod next week, you must allow me to give you a quantity of legal tender currency (US coins or paper dollars) to settle the debt.
If you require payment upon receipt, however, you can refuse to exchange the cow for cash.
You still need a middleman to broker the transaction to whatever the legal tender currency is, so why not just exchange shares of GLD or SLV online?
That's not the point though.
Whether Free Software is at odds (or not) with capitalism shouldn't matter at all in any intelligent discussion.
But I don't think we should exclude the capitalism debate from an intelligent discussion since it has pretty huge implications. If you're advocating a system that is incompatible with capitalism, you have to first make the case for an alternative to capitalism.
It's not as though any idea that's at odds with capitalism will require "an alternative system". There's not gonna be any change to the system that requires a new theory of economics.
Suppose bitcoins are at odds with capitalism because they're just like gold (yes I know this is ridiculous, but just for argument's sake). What now? Should bitcoiners make a case for an "alternative to capitalism"? No. You will still be able to buy and sell and own property and trade and own factories and rent an office space and build a company and hire employees.
No you wouldn't. All of those things are the exact opposite of capitalism, since they prevent voluntary association and threaten body, liberty and property.
I just got this idea right now, but I think a pure capitalism will deteriorate very quickly into a dictatorship. All it takes is for someone to accumulate enough military power so that he can take over. Assuming you can buy/sell groups of armed people and/or hire them.
in a purely free market people won't want to do business with people who violate others' property rights since you have no guarantee they won't violate yours.
traditionally, guarantees against this have been ethnic. "well I know he won't enslave me since the norm is to only enslave blacks, therefore we can both happily profit from the slave trade and are no threat to each other."
The standards of traditional western contract law for what counts as a voluntary agreement (i.e. not one entered into under coercion or duress) are somewhere in between.
Something can be problematic but that still doesn't make it a bad idea. It might be a brilliant idea which challenges you to modify your viewpoint - perhaps you end up questioning the particular form of capitalism which you think is good. Perhaps you end up endorsing your former viewpoint and discarding the new idea. hasenj's point is perfectly valid: "If an idea is at odds with capitalism, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea" (even if it might be problematic).
For instance, I think Open Source is a great idea, but this alone is not good enough reason to think that selling iPhone apps is evil.
Acting very cautious and defensive around capitalism makes it look like a holy untouchable ideology; this is what annoys me.
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RMS doesn't care if you give him back your changes; he cares that you have the freedom to make any changes you wish. He wants you to be free from artificial restrictions imposed by copyright laws. He doesn't care if you share your changes with him.
Well, he does care if you make your changes available to the users of your software so that they too can make the changes they need. That's the whole point of the license, or you should just use MIT/BSD.
He cares that this freedom propagates to all users, not just you, and so just like he gave you this freedom, you also must pass on this freedom.