Michael Henderson suggests

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Great Good Sense Here

Monday, 28th January 2008

Janet Daley is excellent here:

Because The Market, which seems to have a life and a logic of its own, is nothing more nor less than the sum total of all the inclinations and judgments of everyone who has a stake in it. When Margaret Thatcher said you couldn't buck it, what she meant was that once you understood this principle - that a free market was simply the cumulative expression of all human wants and needs - you realised that it could not be made to do what you or anybody else wanted on the basis of some theoretical or ideological imperative.

And:

There is a profound confusion in our post-socialist climate that makes it almost impossible to talk sense on the subject of free market economics. First there is the basic assumption that "capitalism" is an ideology comparable to "socialism". I dislike the word "capitalism" itself because "ism" suggests a planned system. Free markets are just the human condition in economic terms. They are subject to all the vagaries and flaws of incoherence, greed and confusion of individuals acting en masse.

I would quibble though with the conflation of capitalism and free markets. While we often see them together they are not the same thing at all. Capitalism describes a method of ownership. Free markets describes a method of exchange. Further, while they obviously work well together neither is necessary for the other.

A monopoly can well be capitalist but by the very fact that it is a monopoly it's not acting in a free market.*

A workers' co-operative is not capitalist but can operate in free markets (as John Lewis and the Co-Op shop us).

If I were pushed, if someone were insistent that I choose between the two, having one meaning not having the other, I'd plump for free markets and let the capitalism part go hang. Freedom to exchange as one wishes is to my mind the vastly more important of the two, in both moral and efficiency terms.

* Yes, yes, I know that there are natural monopolies, situations where a free market will move towards the dominance of one firm. But I'm thinking rather of constructed monopolies here, not natural.