Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The system of free enterprise has been dubbed capitalism in order to deprecate and to smear it. However, this term can be considered very pertinent. It refers to the most characteristic feature of the system, its main eminence, viz., the role the notion of capital plays in its conduct.

That's from chapter 13 of Human Action.

I think Robert Murphy's summary is even better:

Capitalism was originally a smear term for the system of free enterprise, meant to imply that this system only serves the narrow interests of the capitalists. However, the term is a good one, for the very notion of capital — of summing the market prices of the resources available for a project — is inextricably linked to monetary calculation, which itself can only occur in a capitalist society.

I was a free-market advocate before I became an advocate of capitalism. The free market is an ethical concept, not an economic one; it is merely the recognition that nonaggression needs to apply to exchange as much as it applies to anything else. (Robert Nozick summarized this idea as "capitalist acts between consenting adults.")

Capitalism is a separate issue and a separate agenda — a positive agenda, in contradistinction to the negative agenda of nonaggression, a utilitarian concept rather than an ethical one — but the more I learned of economics, capital theory, and economic history, the less I could understand the left-libertarian position of embracing the free market while rejecting capitalism.

The free-market anticapitalists define capitalism as any system of political privilege for current capitalists, especially as it suppresses bottom-up competition, entry-level entrepreneurship, and the rights of labor. But we already have plenty of other terms to cover that idea — mercantilism, corporatism, even fascism — but what alternative is there to indicate the universal benefits of capital accumulation, capital structure, and capital calculation — all of which result from the private ownership of the means of production?

In fact, private ownership of the means of production (that is, of capital) was the technical definition of capitalism, even among the anticapitalists who coined the term! The idea of political privilege for capital owners was just an assumed consequence, a conflation of definition and theory.

The only advantage I see to accepting this linguistic conflation is to conciliate the heirs of the New Left, to tease out of them a more consistent individualism without tripping their anticommercial reflexes. But aside from what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, this strategy, it seems to me, does more than postpone anti-economic prejudices; it implicitly promotes them.

Faced with these same prejudices, many anti-anti-capitalists adopted the label of "free enterprise," but that term, taken literally, tells us nothing more than "free market" does. It certainly indicates nothing about the structure of ownership or of the means of production.

Until a free-market anticapitalist can offer me a useful alternative label for the utilitarian economic concept Mises called "capitalism," I'll stick with his reclaimed word.

On LRC this morning, Gary North offers this non-negotiable list of demands, followed by some very encouraging commentary.

Serious, no-nonsense libertarians, whether anarchist or minarchist, demand the abolition of

1. Wars that have not been declared by Congress
2. The maintenance of military bases outside the United States
3. Military defense treaties (NATO, CENTO, etc.)
4. America's membership in the United Nations Organization
5. Graduated ("progressive") income taxation
6. Tax-funded education at any level
7. Government licensing of the right to keep and bear arms
8. The Federal Reserve System's monopoly over money
9. The Social Security system
10. Medicare and Medicaid
11. The Central Intelligence Agency
12. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
13. The National Parks system
14. The Post Office
15. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
16. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
17. The Food and Drug Administration

North adds, "This list of things to abolish is so far outside of mainstream politics that anyone proposing more than one of them is dismissed as a kook."

But he goes on to say,

Yet I contend that most of these demands will be met within the lifetime of my children. Why am I so optimistic about this list? Because I am optimistic about the costs of continuing to operate everything on the list. They will bankrupt the central government.

I hope for Benjamin's sake that he's right.

Read the rest.