Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Capitalism rides the coat-tails of Free Markets, but markets don't require Capitalism. Capitalism is using money to make money but Markets use productivity to make money; the former is imaginary, the latter is real. Because Capitalism is a made up game, it's easy to exploit the rules. If you were explaining Capitalism to a child, it would go something like this: “Imagine you have money; that means you don't have to work, so you can play all day & eat ice cream; but if you don't have money, you'll need to dig ditches every day and worry about bills.” Of course, your child would ask “What's money?” Won't you feel silly answering, “Oh, that's imaginary.”

This distinction is lost on most people who conflate Free Markets with Capitalism because they think Socialism is bad. Socialism tries to manage markets, which requires predicting the future; which is why Socialism is bad, not why Capitalism is good. Free Markets use Emergent Order, which doesn't require anybody predicting anything, events occur spontaneously, like nature. There doesn't have to be a Stock Market or non-participating investors for Free Markets to work. Those artifices, the Capitalism parts, were just tacked onto markets to make them work better and more efficiently. The side-effect was those artificial things could be manipulated, so too many people got a lot of imaginary money for doing nothing, and once they had it, their heirs could do nothing too.