But what is capitalism if not the freedom of people to freely trade the goods that they acquire or create for other goods that they value more? There's nothing

But what is capitalism if not the freedom of people to freely trade the goods that they acquire or create for other goods that they value more? There's nothing that says that it has to explicitly be money that is traded; it could be something as amorphous as trading your time and effort in return for public recognition and acclaim. As software developers, the software stacks we use are a great example of the decentralised 'invisible hand' aspect of markets. Nobody planned the transition from Assembler to C to Java to Python (etc), there's no panel of experts deciding that we're all going to start programming in X language from next year or some government department building the One True Language/Framework/OS. The fact that most of what we use is free is largely irrelevant, because time and effort are not free and all trade is about each party's perception of relative, not absolute, value.