I hadn't considered it that way, so thank you for a second point of view. I had been thinking of capitalism as the 'natural state' or lack of power being applied.
My best shot: Feudalism is to hierarchy as usury is to capitalism.
My best shot: Feudalism is to hierarchy as usury is to capitalism.
It's more natural than centrally planned economies, which absolutely require rule of law, police, etc.
Capitalism is 1) that the relative value of choices needs to be determined and 2) those values are best crowdsourced.
If the rule of law breaks down, people will still trade, they will just trade for things that cannot be stolen or reneged on. Things like honor or reputation. This obviously eliminates the efficiency of a common currency, but at the end of the day, choices still have various priorities and the world is too complicated for even the smartest people to evaluate all the choices for everyone.
Anyway, those are the natural laws. Choices need to be made. Crowdsourcing is best when evaluating prices, especially regarding common goods and services.
Seriously.
Markets are where capital (ie. prior labour(yours or some one/thing else's)) is arbitraged for gain. The important part of this rather simplistic point is the arbitrage, it infers that the system is based on the twin concepts of demand and ownership, (or opportunity and opportunity-cost if you like).
Capitalism is the word we use to describe the de-evolution of markets into the private ownership of the means of production. In other words, where enough asymmetrical arbitration has taken place to enable an entity to buy out the rights of someone else to own the profit (ie. the demand portion) from the fruits of their labour. The ultimate expression of this private ownership is the ownership of the people themselves, ergo Feudalism.
Funnily, the last few centuries we attribute to the rise of capitalism, is actually the death throes of unfettered capitalism. See, the interesting thing about ownership it is a social compact, not a natural state. We can trade an item to both our benefits, only because we both agree that you own it and I do not. In a sense, the power IS the asymmetry in the arbitrage. Where this power is balanced between parties, we have free markets. Where it is not balanced, we have capitalism.
I used my resources to produce more resources, you did too, and we exchanged in a way we both considered to be in our best interest (Or we wouldn't have done it).
If I'm way off base I'd love to hear.
Lots of societies have free trade that I don't think would be usefully described as "capitalist." (And anecdotally societies in which free trade is discouraged seem to end up with a lot of black market free trade activity -- it is just too powerful an attractor.)
To me capitalism is a more descriptive of a narrower and more modern development. Free trade is an aspect of it, but not sufficient to describe it.