Hah, okay well let's see where this goes!

I do actually support capitalism, though my opinion is that I only really support it in theory and that the few decades I've been alive have had too much market intervention to really be considered capitalism.

I generally would trust a free market to optimize well enough, much like I would trust "the mob" in a democracy to decide its own fate well enough.

I fall very must on the side of individual liberty. That means people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't impede other's rights to do the same. It also means, though, trusting that the outcome of such a system is going to be roughly optimized and should nearly always be better than a centrally planned solution.

In the context of housing prices, neighborhoods or cities rising and falling, etc I see that as a good thing and as a sign that markets are reflecting general sentiment among consumers. We learn from why we think one market is now more favorable and respond by shifting other markets to better match that demand.

Where Adam Smith really loses me is in monetary policy. Arguments of a world before money looking like someone with bread and in need of chicken wandering around to find someone with chicken and needing bread is just ridiculous. Societies without money, or with a very loose concept of money, were likely to be much smaller groups of people (think the Dunbar number) that worked to take care of each other. You may have had someone that made bread for the community and you just went and got some when you needed it. Everything didn't revolve around IOU transactions among unfamiliar parties because you were familiar. Money is way Kore useful as a medium when you don't really know or don't really trust the other party.

Oh! That's nuanced! I was just thinking that what we call non-zero sum thinking today is the basis of both capitalism and socialism. [1] So if you reject it, I thought you must have some really interesting alternate economic theory you adhere to.

That said, do you think it's more likely that every single interaction between humans would be an exact -1/+1 value exchange, or do you think it'd be a bit more messy like -0.45/+1.213 . If the latter, couldn't -1.1/-4.5 or +2.43/+3.14159 also be possible exchanges?

[1] both capitalism and socialism (despite their many differences) share the premise that economic organization can create more value than would exist without it. They differ primarily on how that value should be distributed and who should control the means of production, not on whether value creation itself is possible.