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Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

bbnet — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:16:53 GMT

"There is certainly a time to change the vocabulary when society has co-opted the underlying meanings or definitions. " (quote link not working with new toolbar?)

Perhaps we should fight fire with fire by co-opting vocabulary that we reject?

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

Jackson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:26:31 GMT

http://mises.org/daily/4222

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

JAlanKatz — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:26:33 GMT

Cushing, what would you like to educate the public about? How does one find the correct meaning of a term? In the case of capitalism, it originally meant what it means today, and its just a few people who use it to mean free markets. What makes that definition correct?

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

JAlanKatz — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:24:26 GMT

The avoidance of anti-social behavior leads immediately to trade, division of labor, and social cooperation. So, again, social-ism implies all that.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

Richard D. Cushing — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:54:49 GMT

There is certainly a time to change the vocabulary when society has co-opted the underlying meanings or definitions. However, I would argue for an attempt at educating the public before changing words that have meant something for decades or longer.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

filc — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:39:05 GMT

JAlanKatz, The accumulation of capital implies division of labor and social cooperation. So again, capital--ism implies all of that.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

wilderness — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:20:49 GMT

filc:
Capital--ism is named as such for a very important reason.

Those who want to rid of it may not have stopped to consider the fundamental roll that capital plays on the overall wellbeing of an economy. Capital is fundamental and it implies everything libertarians hold dear. We already lost liberalism, why forfeit a perfectly good name when it means precisely what it should, regarding capital and the accumulation there of.

And think about this. These are only terms of recent origin in which the effort to hijack and subvert their meaning has happen (by recent I mean the last two hundred years or so). Natural law of the private property kind has been in a semantic battle with Marxists and other statists (Hobbes, Spinoza) for at least 500 years. It's why it is of importance to not get stuck on superficial names, ie. semantics, and let words in and of themselves determine what is meaningful. The substance of what some people actually mean takes place when truth is valued. This goes for anybody no matter what they are talking about.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

JAlanKatz — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:54:50 GMT

Yes, capital is vital in an economy. Social behavior is vital for a society, too, and perhaps more central to over all wellbeing than even capital. We oppose anti-social behavior, such as murder and theft. Yet this is not a good reason to call libertarianism socialism, is it?

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

fancyshirtman — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:08:29 GMT

"Capital--ism is named as such for a very important reason.

Very good point, filc. Thanks.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

thelion — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 07:03:19 GMT

We haven't lost liberalism. Read Hayek's essay, "Why I'm Not a Conservative."

I've talked to plenty of PolitSci people (virtually all Europeans, however) who associate liberalism with straight market enterprise in the classical liberal way.

Buts that's because they actually might know history of the word.

Secondly, I agree with filc; Mises in Human Action, when defining Capital with the entreprenuerial process of deciding what are to him as a producer capital goods and what are consumption goods, explained Capitalism is the heart of the market (as thought Gossen, to a lesser extent).

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

filc — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 06:46:14 GMT

Capital--ism is named as such for a very important reason.

Those who want to rid of it may not have stopped to consider the fundamental roll that capital plays on the overall wellbeing of an economy. Capital is fundamental and it implies everything libertarians hold dear. We already lost liberalism, why forfeit a perfectly good name when it means precisely what it should, regarding capital and the accumulation there of.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

Nielsio — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 03:24:25 GMT

Novus Zarathustra wrote:

With a society being kept informed as it is by pundits, colummnists, intellectuals, an education system, and the media. I have concluded that these words are dangerous, and we should instead embrace the term "Voluntarism" instead of Anarchy or Capitalism, and say "mutual exchange" instead of free markets.

I think 'capitalism' is a perfectly fine word, and so are 'the free market', and so on. I believe the trouble is not with the meaning of the word, but what people think are the consequences of mutual exchange, the free market, and capitalism. People believe the consequences of the free market are indeed a corrupt insurance industry, a corrupt pharma industry, and even a corrupt war-machine. People believe these consequences are all due to a lack of regulation. This means that they believe the markets are too free. This means that there's no misunderstanding with the meaning of those words, but with the connection with reality. The markets are usually far from free, and of course are they corrupted because they are partly free or because of their regulation? Those are things we have to explain to the public.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

E. R. Olovetto — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 03:01:40 GMT

Most of the people who have recently been opposing the word "capitalism" I deem anti-liberty. Still, "libertarianism" and "capitalism" only have meaning in reference to the anti-human practices of statists. I am ready to cast them all off and live in a free (human) society.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

Christy Ann Welty — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 02:57:47 GMT

I agree with the original poster here, and with the last two posters also.

In convos with regular folks who don't appreciate the foundational meanings of the words, and are likely to associate them with their corrupted meanings, it is best to use uncorrupted words. So a fresh lexicon will do some good things there.

In convos with folks who DO understand these words (like us! yay!), they work very well because they DO have history, context, depth, and resonance.

Re: We should stop using the words "Capitalism", "Free Market" and "Anarchy".

Justin Spahr-Summers — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 02:40:20 GMT

"Voluntaryism" is a nice term for slowly easing someone into critical thinking without bringing in preconceived notions, but I wholeheartedly disagree that we should abandon terms like "capitalism" or "free market." The problem isn't that the words have bad connotations in and of themselves, but that the meaning behind those words has been distorted by capitalism's enemies. I think Ayn Rand had the right idea with reclaiming such words and using them as a way to reference that which is heroic and great.