It certainly is odd to name a supposedly free market economy after a particular factor of production. Why not a free market system (laborism?) in which associated labor is the residual claimant and hires capital?

I think Thomas Hodgskin (who was both a Ricardian socialist and a classical liberal, a sort of British forerunner of the Boston anarchists) was a lot closer to the truth in the way he used the term “capitalism.”

He used it to refer, not to the free market, but to a system of political economy in which capitalists were the ruling class. Capitalists dominated the state in the same way that landed elites had done under the Old Regime. He shared the American individualist anarchists’ belief that the quickest route to socialism (defined as labor keeping its full product) was eliminating “artificial rights of property” that enabled the owning classes to collect scarcity rents. Hodgskin and the Boston anarchists foreshadowed Roemer’s idea that economic exploitation is impossible without artificial scarcity of land and capital.

This is good stuff. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to contribute some of these ideas to the paper Jim Harper and I are working on on the economics of peer production. So far, it’s been sadly neglected by the two of us, but I’m definitely planning to come back and work on it more in the not-too-distant future. At the very least, you should add links to these posts to remind us to come back and re-read these posts when we’re writing that section.

If you do make contributions, we’ll be sure to credit you appropriately if/when we get to the point of publishing it.

Thanks!