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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc.

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).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMb_72hgkJk

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Not treating people as property is a distortion of the free market. If people aren't property, what incentive do companies have to invest in their education? Rich people would be much more likely to pay for the education of their slaves if they were assured of strong property rights over them. How can you properly price human capital if there isn't a free market in it?

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.

I've yet to hear of someone who felt as a criminal after quitting his job (or after stealing himself from his employer as you put it).

Gah! You've completely missed the point of my irony. There's scarcely any point discoursing with you.

Well, you're not talking about capitalism. Your whole reasoning is based on a false premise, because there are limits to the kind of transactions allowed in a free market. In a free market, you are free to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's freedom. Your freedom ends where someone else's begins.

Hence, slavery not being compatible with capitalism is a fact, not a distortion of the free market nor a mere opinion.

We're talking about market freedom not individual freedom. You're confusing the two. Companies owned by larger companies can still both operate in a free market. It's no different in principle for people. And my irony was about phrasing the ownership of people issue in free market terms to show how it is distorting (and it straight out is), not to argue for it or that there aren't other approaches to the same problems.

Our current quasi-free markets already do have "assassination" contracts - your supermarket pays a slaughterhouse to assassinate cows. We also have slavery - horses are forced to labor for whatever amount of money their owners give them.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science )

True, but that's a problem of semantics which is not specific to the definition of capitalism. Whatever system you advocate, you'll have to define the terms you employ: "person", "market participant", "proletariat", "equality", etc.

Is capitalism the same as the free market?

There might be other definitions, but I was referring to free market capitalism.

Edit: Why the hell am I being down voted here?

No idea why you were being downvoted. I was just curious, as people were using the terms interchangably and they aren't always used that way.

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