The major benefit of any productive organisation is what is produced: the benefit that people get from what the company (or co-op or individual) pumps out. This is known as the consumer surplus and this really ought to be known even at Cambridge. The benefit of Google is not cushy jobs for engineers, nor the lack of tax revenue in the UK, the benefit of Google's existence is that we all get to use Google. Whether VW's R&D is in Wolfsburg or not matters very much less than that we all have the chance to drive VWs.

This is an example of how Chang continually conflates capitalism and markets. They're really just not the same thing. They might work well together but capitalism is a description of who gets to own the productive asserts: the capitalists. Markets describe a method of exchange. These simply are not the same thing at all. Indeed, we can have capitalism without markets (the Soviet system was state captialism without markets) and we can have various forms of socialism with markets (Tito's Yugoslavia was an attempt at this and we can certainly have socialist entities within markets: Mondragon, the Co Op and John Lewis come to mind), but it is vital to keep in mind that the two are descriptions of different things, not just interchangeable names for the same socio-economic system.

We should be rather harsher than that too. Everywhere, anywhere, that has been roughly free market, roughly capitalist, for the past century is so stinking rich that the bus driver does get paid 50 times what a better one in India gets paid. That's actually the point of the entire socio-economic structure: it makes even bus drivers rich by any global or historical standard.

Most growth in the economy, and almost all employment growth, comes from new entrants into the market. It is small firms starting and growing, old firms failing and leaving, which changes the marketplace. Yes, of course, we can all think of examples of the opposite: I can never remember whether it is Ericsson or Nokia that started out making gumboots and switched to mobile phones. But this is very much the exception. It is the start ups that revolutionise the economy to all of our great benefit.

Once we accept that then the very idea of trying to insist upon the long term viability of a specific company becomes a nonsense. We want to be able to increase and grow the economy into the future, yes we most certainly do. But there's no particular reason why the corporate entity called Rover, or Rolls Royce, or Glencore, should survive long term. Indeed, there's good reason why we'd be quite happy for firms to die out at some point. That point being when their particular skills and advantages are no longer appropriate to the demands of the rest of us in the economy.

We free marketeers do though have a set of hard and fast rules. They're at the heart of what classical liberalism is all about. Best summed up in Mill's freedom to swing the fist ending where the nose of another begins. This does give is hard rules. Subject to one exception, markets are the default: except where the exercise of a market right interferes with the rights of another. I cannot claim a free market in someone else's boots but I most certainly can in my own. I cannot insist that someone else work a certain set of hours: but I can indeed insist that he be free to determine his own.

For a while, as government intruded ever deeper and more destructively into what was once a relatively free market, so-called conservatives who wanted to pretend that this was the good form of capitalism labeled it "the mixed economy."

But since the mixture consists of freedom and compulsion the compulsion always wins. Hence, corporatism.

“As an economic system capitalism has nothing to do with responsibility,” says the Marxist sage, yet this is perverse, uninformed, given that trust and being responsible to fulfill one’s promises is essential to free market capitalism. Indeed, one reason that that system works pretty well when uncorrupted by state interference is that those who fail to be responsible do not flourish in it unless favored with privileges they haven’t earned.

Politicians pursue their party interests by doing down others, but capitalists can serve their own interests only by serving other people's. If they deliver excellent products, services and value to customers, they will prosper. If they deliver bad value, they will fall to the competition.

Some words are harsh and the concepts they embody seem harsher. Some notions seem too idealistic for many cynics. Peace, love, and freedom are all words that get a bad rap as head-in-the-clouds concepts that don't describe reality as it actually exists.

But we do know that in a world where not all is peaceful, love is sometimes hard to find, and freedom is always in peril, all of these ideals, insofar as they are allowed to flourish, point the way to a future of harmony and plenty.

The same is true of capitalism. Don't let its enemies spoil a good word for the greatest economic system in the history of the human race.

For it's true, capitalists don't like capitalism very much, or at least they don't like the free market (or even freeish market) version of it very much. Sure, it's great to play the big lasagne and wax fat off the sweat of the workers' brows. But not when anyone else is allowed to try doing the same. For that means the workers' wages get bid up, prices to consumers go down as competition rears its ugly head. The capitalist would prefer that only this one particular capitalist should be allowed to indulge in the practice: or at worst, a carefully selected and approved list of people who won't rock the boat too much. That crony capitalism, that rent seeking, which can only be done in a stable manner with the collusion and connivance of government.

Which is why we good little liberals need to keep banging on about the market part of the system: capitalism's all very well but it must be regulated and tempered by the fact that everyone's allowed to indulge in it, not just the favoured few.

Capitalism is up front about placing responsibility on free men and women and for this it gets a bad rep from those who are duped into thinking that one can tell the full content of a book by its fancy cover. Capitalism, unlike the welfare state, is more like parents who impose discipline and refuse to spoil their children however much they whine about it. Those who think the system is therefore a cruel one are comparable to teens who bellyache about their parents because they are more interested in justice than in mercy (which in exceptional cases is fine but not as a routine).

The left purposely mislabels corporatism as free market capitalism and rejects it, while the right purposely mislabels corporatism as free market capitalism and embraces it. That way they both whitewash the evils of big government so they can justify using its coercive powers to impose their own agenda on everyone.

Libertarians rightly identify corporatism as the evil spawn of coercive government and reject both while embracing the true freedom of the free market, which is laissez-faire capitalism.