>You're being beyond obtuse if you're looking to define capitalism as anything other than the laissez-faire free market. This seems like you're being willfully

>You're being beyond obtuse if you're looking to define capitalism as anything other than the laissez-faire free market. This seems like you're being willfully ignorant of what capitalism actually means and using "academic" as a pejorative, as if for some reason actually gaining knowledge about the topic shouldn't be considered valid knowledge. Would you say the same thing about how mathematicians define "real numbers"? That it is merely an academic exercise? It is a term of art in economics and sociology, it does not describe merely a system of free exchange in general. Capitalism includes the concept of free exchange but it is not defined only as such. It's also not even used in the way you're using it, as an ideological descriptor - a capitalist is a very particular kind of person, in particular one who owns capital. It is not equivalent to "socialist" in this regard. The arguments against capitalism generally also apply to "laissez-faire free markets", but other than that, a "laissez-faire free market" could not exist without capital due to the development of technology in the modern world.