That's one of the great victories of capitalism: somehow it has convinced people that a 300 year-old economic system originating in north-western Europe is as natural as the air we breathe, and as inevitable as gravity or any natural law.

You have to threaten to shoot people to get them to practice any other -ism.

So, yes, capitalism in the sense of the freedom to trade one's labor does appear to be naturally and universally emergent in advanced human societies, in the absence of violent interference.

Capitalism is certainly not characterized by the absence of violent interference.

Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism. It's not imposed upon you forcefully, you just aren't allowed to get in the way.

To the extent that certain aspects of capitalism lead to violence, those are elements that other parties -- generally corporations or governments rather than writers or philosophers -- added to the ideology.

People die trying to break out of non-capitalist countries, while they die trying to break in to capitalist ones. That's one possible way to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

> Yes, it is. The violence comes in when you interfere with capitalism.

Ahahah, I absolutely love this sentence. You might have said the quiet part out loud though.

“You gots to understand”, said Fat Tony, “I'm not a violent man. The violence simply comes in when you interfere with my business.”

(Shrug) Taking peoples' rights away, including their economic rights, is likely to get the hurt put on you. Ric Romero has more on this late-breaking story at 11.

It sounds funny but he may have a point. It's not a quality of capitalism per se, had it been communism instead then communism would have been the best system for the present moment.

But capitalism prevails and may be the best system there is for now because I cannot fathom a change in system overnight that would not result in mass suffering for (almost) everyone.

Capitalism has violent coercion at its core, in order to enforce its property rights. You simply think that that violence is legitimate and unproblematic because you believe the system it upholds is "natural" and legitimate, but at this point you're arguing in circles. But to say that capitalism is not violent is laughable.

Paying people to make art is older than “capitalism”. Capitalism is when you can own and trade capital, not when you pay people to do things.

What? No. Capitalism is a more specific system for organizing goods and services, wherein the means of production and distribution of those goods and services (buildings, land, machines and other tools, vehicles etc) are privately owned and operated by workers (who are paid a wage) for the profit of the owners. That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places. Also, capitalism is separate from copyright and other IP, though IP as currently implemented is pretty obviously a capitalist concept.

> That's only been the norm for a few hundred years, and only in certain places.

Can you point to a system that worked well before that you'd like to go back to?

At the moment I'd rather not get involved in an online argument about which economic systems are better than than which other ones... especially not on a forum run by a startup accelerator, with a constraint that my preferred system has to be more than 300 years old.

I just wanted to point out that capitalism is in fact a specific economic system. It's not a law of nature, or another word for "markets" or "freedom", or a realization that some other system doesn't work.

Your question assumes the only alternatives involve going back, not forwards. There are still many untried sociopolitical systems.