A Roman Catholic friend argues, as I understand her, that capitalism and free market are not synonymous. Catholicism is free market, but not capitalistic. Capitalism says “Produce, consume, produce, consume, more and more!” and free market just says “Produce what you need to consume.” This leaves plenty of time for leisure/a meditative life. She says capitalism is really Calvinistic (Protestant work ethic) whereas free market ideas are not so.
Is this representative of a more general distinction made by Catholics, or is this an unusual position? I would be interested in Catholic responses/discussion.
Sounds like pure ignorance of you ask me. She also needs to define her usage of the term capitalism. Capitalism was a pejorative used by Marx against liberalized economic systems, aka, free markets. Capitalism means that anyone is able to engage in voluntary mutually beneficial transactions. This notion of capitalism (though it wasn’t called capitalism) was introduced by the Catholic Jesuits, and was later pursued and further elucidated by the Austrian school of economics. Free markets don’t say, “produce what you need to consume” that’s more along the lines of communism, as the term “need” is extremely spurious. Instead, it says, “produce what you want to consume, and you’ll have what you need to consume.”