Exactly -- and all this obscures how those things came to be: with fierce struggle from the lower classes (workers, women, blacks, etc.) in most cases, handed over to the patricians of the state in others (e.g. US Declaration of Independence and so on) and spread more widely later. Not from the system for running the economy.

Heck, Hayek, for one, a champion of capitalism, was in bed with Pinochet.

And one of the things western countries did when they entered capitalism, was to conquer and enslave 2/3rds of the world in their colonies. So much for democracy.

But Democracy does solve a number of issues capitalism has. Free-markets allocate tangible and (pardon the cliché term) fungible goods quite well.

Non-tangible (e.g. intellectual property) and non-fungible (e.g. environment) goods are not managed well in a purely capitalist system. Some sort of a majority vote and public goods solution work much better and in fact create the necessary infrastructure (safe streets, reliable electricity, clean water) for capitalism to function.

So Capitalism ?> Democracy, but Democracy => Capitalism is more true than not.

The very idea that people can have exclusive control of some goods and then have to trade for other ones is capitalism. Property is not the default state of the universe, it had to be invented and enforced before it meant anything.

And while it can be called a freedom in a certain sense, property is also a restriction. In order for me to own something, you have be denied the right to use it without my permission.

Which is not to say property rights are not a good thing on the whole, but they should be compared as one economic system, in terms of their outcomes, alongside the alternatives.

Capitalism is about minimally throttling creativity and private property.

Communism/Socialism (thinking of the EU here) seem to view lack of regulation as chaos.

No. Do not want.

How do you picture capitalism operating such that corporations don't emerge? In my mind I can't separate the accumulation of capital from corporate capitalism, at least given sufficient time.

Yes, it is. Historically, it is an intentional decision society collectively makes at the behest of and for the benefit of thr mercantile class.

> that arises in the presence of (1) property rights, and (2) freedom of association

Property rights are much older than capitalism, freedom of association as a widespread normn is newer and not super consistently found with capitalism. The particular structure of property rights that characterizes capitalism, which is very different from the system of property rights that characterized, say, feudalism, is not the same thing as “property rights” generally, though supporters of capitalism often confuse the two concepts.

No, it's not.

Capitalism is one of many models of how the state can regulate commerce through the definition of the parameters and boundaries of property rights.

We are all in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn't mean free markets, it has a much wider definition than that, and doesn't require free markets.

Huh? Capitalism is literally a state of economic freedom. People accumulate capital via consensual economic transactions, then decide what to do with it (stuff like funding Wikipedia!). How is this contrary to a free society?

No, it's a model of property rights. “Free markets” are a slogan, but not even a particularly coherent concept much less a concrete thing that is present in capitalism.

“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.

> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.

Well, yes, since “capitalism” was literally coined to describe a particular then-existing system in which the instrumentality of the state not only exists but also, most particularly through a specific structure of property rights, directly serves the interests of the capital-owning class to the relative disadvantage of other segments of society, and has consistently since then referred to that system (or ones sharing some of its salient features) both for those who have advocated moving farther from it and for those advocating its adoption or a return to it in places which have moved on, in whole or in part, from it.

There are other systems that we've tried which work much better than the corporate Capitalism that we have in the United States. Most notably democratic socialism/social democracy/mixed economies (with the exact dividing lines between those three depending a lot on who you ask).

That seems to equate our current system as the only thing that qualifies as capitalism. Slavery or the abolition of slavery both seem happy to coexist in our definition of capitalist societies. We are happy to talk about ownership of the means of production without including the ownership of workers. The same presumably applies to the existence or non existence of individual elements like intellectual property etc.

Ie. The idea of patents of limited duration alongside copyright of seemingly endless duration both seem to qualify as capitalism.

Capitalism was never about that. It was about having acting in their own self-interest as to maximize economic efficiency. That model works great when you are selling commodities and physical products.

Capitalism in the era of personal information as currency is a entirely different beast that needs to be reworked.

*freedom for the property owner. Which is why it can facilitate a slave trade, property is a limitation of freedom.

Just a nitpick, there is another condition, which is that the labor is traded on the free market under capitalism. I can imagine a society where everything is done in cooperatives where the workers are also the owners (they have shared private ownership).

Not exactly, but that is a necessary condition. I think another necessary condition is that prices are set by the market and that the state isn't deeply involved in trade. Obviously there are grey areas, but it seems pretty clear that the export focused state trade policies of mercantilism were not capitalism.

It's tough to respond to statements like this as written. 'Capitalism', 'democracy' and 'work well' are not precise terms, and the statement can be either true or false depending on the shade of meaning.