(This is a wonderful post.)

In the spirit of further laughter and geeking:

I’m not so much an anarcho-capitalist. While I’m severely critical of states, I believe strongly in governance: basic rights take priority over consent of individuals. It’s not the ideal, but states play a role in protecting rights under the rule of law. Maybe I’m an archonoclast, but I don’t see myself as an anarchist.
I’m only a capitalist insofar as I believe that a system that invests in and understands wealth as human creativity is morally superior to a conservative economy in which wealth is land/natural resources. Human creativity is potentially infinite, whereas atoms on Earth are finite.
When I talk about wealth, I’m not just referring to cash and resources, but all kinds of wealth: longer, more fulfilling lives, lower infant mortality, art, music, and everything that can make life richer. Making life richer leads to diminishing marginal utility; that is, the happiness generated by wealth is monumental at the survival level, huge at the comfort level, slight at the luxury level, and corresponds to unhappiness after that (these categories are made-up). But with the majority of Earth’s seven billion people living in grinding poverty, we are in no great danger any time soon of making life too rich.
Conservative economies that see land/resources as the only wealth are caught in a zero-sum, fixed-pie game of domination. Capitalism, on the other hand, shows that wealth can grow because creative people can create new ways to solve problems. Society can get richer from entrepreneurs (including social entrepreneurs) who make better things and better processes. In conservative economies, innovating is too risky, but capitalism opens the way for creative people to fully harness opportunities that offer scope for their creativity.
Without liberty, capitalism leads to very distorted and dehumanizing outcomes. Political capitalism exploits this, allowing entities that degrade human rights to operate with impunity, like the Devil’s Mafia, as long as they maximize short-term profits. Political capitalism treats profit-maximizing as a zero-sum game, without regard for long-term good, liberty, or basic rights, and denying the scope of human creativity. Political capitalism and cartelism depend on the broken window fallacy.
Liberal markets are a separate issue from capitalism, and one that I deem more important (but not more important than basic rights of security and subsistence, without which freedom cannot exist). A free market is one in which people are free to choose what they are willing to give and receive from others.
The precedence of liberty is essential. Without protection of freedom based on protection of basic rights, “free market” is reduced to Orwellian doublespeak. Cf. “liberalization” of Latin America, et alia.
As a rule, states do not allow market freedoms to extend beyond the interests of elites.
But market freedom and capitalism have a lot to offer none-the-less. Michael Strong writes: “Except for those countries ravaged by war, citizens in even Africa’s poorest nations have a higher standard of living, less infant mortality, and a longer life span, than did the average peasant in Europe, China, India, or Africa in 1400. If we believe that being alive is better than being dead, capitalism has made everyone on earth better off.”
I have other problems with capitalism too, and not just what I would call “cartelism” or “political capitalism”– I have problems with capitalism as a way. While I deem capitalism morally superior to fixed-pie conservative economies, it isn’t the end of our moral growth as a society. We need to go further, extending freedom to all life on Earth. Under capitalism, Nature is regarded as an input to production, rather than a cocreative partner in the dynamically stable, spontaneous order of life on earth, of which the human economy is merely a satellite. Under free market principles, capitalism as it presently exists is unconscionable. We can evolve beyond capitalism not by rejecting free markets and segregating humans from the land, but by extending rights to the land itself and engaging the land in our own symbiotic naturalization.

I wish I had time to write more, but I have to get back to work.

@Derek: I’m disappointed that you’re lumping Hayek in with Rothbard and Mises without looking over the short essay I posted in reference to the conversation. But, I know you’re busy, as am I. To boot, I haven’t looked at the link you posted yet either.

It wasn’t really a name-drop-athon, or at least that wasn’t my intention.