Capitalism, like a gun or a hammer or a nail, is a tool. It’s a system. It has zero inherent morality. Morality only comes into play when humans decide to use those tools. A hammer that is used to build a house through Habitat for Humanity would be a moral use of that hammer, most people would say. A hammer used to break your neighbor’s window is immoral, unless you are breaking the window to get him out of a burning house, in which case it is moral again. A gun used to commit a crime is used immorally, a gun used to protect yourself from an attacker is seem by most people as a moral use of a weapon. In all of these examples, the objects are just tools, free from goodness or badness until they are used in some manner by people capable of being good and bad.

The free market is the same way. It’s a tool. When it is used by businesses to make both the business and the customer better off, most people would agree that it is a moral transaction. When a private equity firm swoops in, liquidates a business, lays off all the employees, and enriches nobody but the initial investors, people may debate the morality of such a thing. It’s not an attack against the amoral system, it’s an attack against how the system is being used. Saying critics are “attacking capitalism” in this case is as absurd as saying people are “attacking cars” when they fault criminals for drunk driving.

As I’ve said many times before, I happen to think that the free market is a mighty useful system for a lot of things. I won’t, however, ascribe morality to it a priori. It’s not inherently moral; it’s not inherently immoral. What matters is what people do within and throughout the system. We can all agree to use a system while still debating the morality of using that system in certain ways. It’s perfectly acceptable to try to ban things largely considered “wrong” even if they are allowed within the rules of the free market. Defining “right” and “wrong” and getting that balance right is difficult, of course, but it’s a good and healthy debate. I welcome an honest debate about the merits of private equity firms, of CDOs, and of payday lenders, to name a few (and there are good arguments on both sides of the debate for those three examples). I shun, though, any attempt by people to close off the debate by claiming it’s an attack against the free market. And that is exactly what Romney is doing.

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Ten years ago, my car didn’t even have airbags. Today, cars come with all sorts of safety devices.

Ten years ago, my computer had 32 MB of RAM and a 300 MB hard drive. Today, I have half a terabyte of storage and a quad-core processor that can handle anything I throw at it.

Ten years ago, what’s a DVD player? Today, not only are DVD players a commodity, but I could have BluRay if I wanted.

I just took a week-long trip to Colorado on a plane, stayed in a nice hotel, and rented a car, and I am by no means rich.

You can walk into just about any fast-food joint and get a (admittedly unhealthy) full meal for a few bucks.

Ten years ago, my cell phone had crappy service and a two-line, monochrome dot matrix display. Today, the service isn’t quite as crappy, but my phone sure looks a lot better.

Not to mention the fact that cell phone, computer, internet, and broadband market penetration is much higher now than ten years ago, among other things.

The point of this isn’t that we’ve had great technological advances, although we have. The point is that for the most part, all of these new advances come to us at the same cost, or even cheaper, than they were not too long ago. In a huge number of arenas, the free market has worked to give us better products at less cost. The market can and has worked wonders.

So maybe, just maybe, if you look at health care, where there are more uninsured people today than ten years ago, and health care costs more than it did back then…perhaps the free market just isn’t working so well in this area.