This is a fascinating and complex question posed by the NY Times blog Deal Journal and answered by conservative blogger and UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge in his blog posting of the same name. Bainbridge's answer is, of course, "Heck no!"
The article on Deal Journal cites this article by Stefan Theil which asserts that in many European educational systems, capitalism is taught to be considered a failure and uses this viewpoint as the basis for explaining current polls of European Union citizens who largely do not favor traditional Western Capitalism and therefore are American Hating Pinko Commie Scum (AHPCS).
After reviewing both Bainbridge's and Theil's articles, I must say: You guys sure do answer like rich people. Capitalism has been working in our hemisphere for well over 200 years - for rich people. The poor, on the other hand, have for a bulk of that time been enslaved, unable to vote, indentured and sorely undereducated and underserved in a wide variety of "public" services.
While capitalism itself isn't immoral, it inevitably leads to the immorality of capitalists. Seeing that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking the law, it's also true that ignorance of the abuses of human beings is no excuse for supporting the abuse of human beings.
The truth is, that for capitalism to work there must be desire or need. This is the lifeblood of any capitalistic system; if people didn't want or need dollars, they wouldn't go to work - simple as that. In order for there to be desire or need, there must be a LACK of that which is to be desired and/or needed - in our case: Dollars. Now that we have that settled, the next thing to keep in mind is that in order for that thing (dollars, again) to have any value whatsoever there has to be a limited supply of them - if dollars grew on trees, they wouldn't be worth anything (how much are acorns going for these days?), same thing goes for equal distribution: if everyone had the same amount of dollars, no one would care about transferring them. Remembering that we need people to need dollars, and there can only be so many of them, that means that some people must have plenty and some people must have not enough. Capitalism relies on this imbalance to keep going, and in our system, not having enough money also means not having enough healthcare, not having enough housing and not having enough food.
As if it weren't enough that we live in a system that requires some to live in poverty. This system also relies on heated competition. While I'm sure a load of people assert that healthy competition is a great thing, we have allowed it to nearly erase cooperation. Admittedly, this serves us in some ways, and it screws us in others: We may have many different companies and organization working to find a cure for cancer, but the climate of competition prevents them from openly sharing their data during trials. I think it's also fair to say that the 10 year old boy who made your GAP jeans in a sweatshop so that GAP and it's suppliers can maintain a healthy profit margin has an entirely different perspective on competition. Or should we ask all of the American citizens who lost their jobs when factories moved across borders thanks to NAFTA? Or should we have to ask all of the people who pay too much for insurance and medical services because we've allowed and encouraged private firms to profit from other peoples suffering and illness?
These things don't happen alongside capitalism, they happen because of capitalism and it's a system that necessitates immorality. So no, capitalism itself isn't immoral. Much in the same way that a handgun isn't immoral, one still has to something of questionable morality to get any practical use out of it.
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