When it comes to production, capitalism and socialism are often presented as constituting extremes of a spectrum of economic organization, where control over the means of production is either entirely in the hands of profit-seeking private owners (the capitalists) at one extreme or in the hands central planners (supposedly acting for the benefit of society according to socialists) at the other extreme.

Framing the question with such terminology implicitly smears capitalists as profiting at the expense of society; a sordid linguistic trick that pretends that coercive centralization is more "social" than the capitalist alternative. This conceptual fog blinds one to the inherently anti-social totalitarian tyranny of the collectivist abrogation of profits and losses, which occurs in spite of the best intentions of many well-meaning socialists.

Apart from the framing problem, there is also the problem that central planning isn't the only type of deviation from capitalism. The individualist/capitalist alternative is founded on the libertarian principle that each individual is at liberty to do anything that doesn't transgress against the private ownership rights of others, where each individual has the right to exclusive control over the use and disposition of oneself and of one's legitimately-acquired property. In a strict application of this libertarian principle, coercion can only be used to defend these rights, deter transgressions of them, or make restitution to rights-holders.

We can immediately deduce from this that central planning must deviate from libertarian principle by requiring rights violations to usurp control over all property that has been peacefully-acquired by non-central planners. Likewise, socialism must curtail the liberty of workers to deviate from the central plans with respect to how they use their labor and their leisure time. In essence, the socialist ideal requires a powerful centralized state to coercively centralize all ownership and stamp out all liberty apart from the liberty of the tyrant who exclusively controls both the economic planning process and the state's means of destruction.

There are, however, at least two other conceivable deviations from libertarian principle that result in economic systems that are distinct from both capitalism and socialism. Posing a false dichotomy between capitalism and socialism breeds confusion in that the evils of these other economic systems can get falsely conflated with either socialism or capitalism, and it understates the challenges of achieving a free and prosperous society by regarding only central planning as the problem.

One possible non-socialist deviation from libertarian principle is the case where the coercive usurpation of private ownership and of curtailment of liberty is not carried out by a powerful centralized state, but rather by a decentralized warrior caste where small bands of warriors can easily dominate non-warriors by virtue of their relatively costly weapons, armor, training, and defensive works, but can in turn resist domination by larger bands of warriors due to the defensive bias of prevailing military techniques (examples being a noble and his knights defying a king and his much larger retinue from within the lord's castle, or armed guildsmen defying lords and kings alike from within their walled towns).