Your average person defending capitalism from a “libertarian”-ish standpoint is defending something - “free market capitalism” - where THEIR definition of that is a system of property distribution based on mutually consensual transactions. So by definition that excludes slavery, child labor (incapable of giving consent), wars, genocides. The remaining 2 points of famine and…famine mixed with inequality, the point of contention would be whether those would continue to occur if you started from a blank slate and removed the skewing effects on property distribution caused by wars of conquest and political manipulation and empire and so on. If you want to say that this is only a theoretical exercise, that “free market capitalism” is an impossibility because any imbalance of property will inevitably spiral out of control into an end-form of fascism and empire, you can certainly make that argument - it is true under some conditions - but then what’s occurring at that point is by definition a different thing than what they’re defending in the first place. So like in so many other cases, this is people arguing about the merits/harms of something, when they are in fact talking about two different things. An exercise in pointless frustration and anger.
Your average person defending capitalism from a “libertarian”-ish standpoint is defending something - “free market capitalism” - where THEIR definition of that is a system of property distribution based on mutually consensual transactions. So by definition that excludes slavery, child labor (incapable of giving consent), wars, genocides. The remaining 2 points of famine and…famine mixed with inequality, the point of contention would be whether those would continue to occur if you started from a blank slate and removed the skewing effects on property distribution caused by wars of conquest and political manipulation and empire and so on. If you want to say that this is only a theoretical exercise, that “free market capitalism” is an impossibility because any imbalance of property will inevitably spiral out of control into an end-form of fascism and empire, you can certainly make that argument - it is true under some conditions - but then what’s occurring at that point is by definition a different thing than what they’re defending in the first place. So like in so many other cases, this is people arguing about the merits/harms of something, when they are in fact talking about two different things. An exercise in pointless frustration and anger.
Define your terms before starting a conversation.