@Hypocrisy_Central I disagree.
A “firm grasp of the free market” generally connotes an indoctrination into free market ideology and not any broad (or deep) understanding of economics. For one thing, “free markets” are inherently unstable and prone to cycles of boom and bust. One of the reasons this is so is because the very rich have what amounts to insider knowledge and can use that advantage to soak the poor. In 1929 and 2009, they were able to inflate and deflate speculative bubbles at will, fleecing the general public coming and going. Even after last year’s near financial meltdown, “free market” ideologues (e.g., John McCain) were advocating even less regulation and “government.”
“Free markets,” if not closely supervised by government will produce a business culture that is virtually indistinguishable from organized crime. If you allow “free market” principles to apply to politics (which this week’s Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in political elections permits), vested monied interests can literally buy up all the media time slots and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. In this respect, economics can not be properly understood apart from politics, where the power of ordinary people to bargain with employers through things like unions and the minimum wage are decided. Likewise, the power of consumers to bargain with producers over things like product safety, truth in advertising, pollution and other externalities are decided in the political arena, not in the “free” markets.
“Free markets” are a useful fiction, in that businesses typically collude in such a way as to minimize competition amongst themselves. Every mature industry in the United States is now dominated by a small handful of corporations, who routinely collude and conspire against the public despite the laws prohibiting these things.
Mowing your own lawn or owning your own big rig does not make you a “capitalist.” A capitalist is someone who owns the means of production and who profits from the labor of others, or who lives on the interest on money lent or other financial securities. To the extent that hedge fund managers are not playing with their own money, they are not capitalists; but virtually everyone who trades in securities also trades for his own account (which is where they make their real money because their information is so much better than the average investor). So they generally are finance capitalists.
As you correctly note, the reason Wal-mart is able to sell so cheaply is because they have cut a deal with the Chinese to sell Chinese goods directly to the American people. Thanks to Wal-mart, American workers (and industry) now have to compete directly with prison labor, child labor, and other non-unionized workers forced to work under sweatshop conditions. Not surprisingly, the “free” market has facilitated the direct transfer of American manufacturing to China. We are no longer a country that makes things that other countries want to buy. The longer this continues, the stronger the Chinese economy will become, and the more hollowed out and weaker the American economy will become, until it eventually collapses—which it nearly did in 2009.
It’s a shame you were scared off in high school. When I took Economics 101 in college, there was no math at all to it. Rather, it was all about the mechanics of how money flows in an economy to generate prices, and the various effects of things like taxation, savings, incentives, trade, government spending (fiscal policy), and interest rates (monetary policy) on the expansion or contraction of the economy. Even the courses in political economy I took in grad school were non-mathematical. (I did eventually take a course in econometrics, which was daunting.)
Without an understanding of how these things actually fit together, you are at the mercy of spin doctors and partisan ideologues. I think I am going to ask another question about what books others recommend to help get people up to speed.