Capitalists are consistently bashed for speculating and gambling and exploiting the needy, and I expect a few eyebrows will be raised by the price paid by Henry Jackson’s firm OpCapita for struggling retailer Game.

Jackson said “I strongly believe there is a place on the high street for a video gaming specialist, and Game is the leading brand in a £2.8 billion market in the UK” and has now bought 333 Game stores for a bargain basement £1.

It’s certainly possible that this price is too low for a firm he clearly believes can turn a profit, but it would be wrong to call this exploitation. He might yet pay off creditors owed £40m.

I lived through a bankruptcy myself and know how it feels to be watching an administrator work slowly, oh so slowly, to work out what has happened and work out what to do. It’s trying in the extreme to know that the money you were promised (and promised again, and again with increasingly less plausible justifications) might not ever get paid, so the nervous joy of hearing news like this is hard to imagine.

But the personal joy of creditors, not to forget up to 3200 staff, is only part of the story. As Richard Wilson of gaming industry association Tiga put it to the BBC “the fact that Game had got this new backing behind it, this new management, I think that’s all for the good”. This demonstrates that capitalism is not all about capital, in fact it is mostly not about capital, but rather about ensuring that capital flows to the person who knows best what to do with it.

OpCapita got 333 stores for £1 but they are putting in more than money. According to City AM OpCapita “invests cash directly, relying on its partners’ knowledge of the retail sectors to push firms back to profitability” and have appointed a former CEO of Halfords as well as rehiring staff from Game’s head office that had been let go. What they are putting in is the time an the know-how required to bring the firm back to profitability. They are using that know how to find and retain the right people with the knowledge to run the firm. Theirs is the wealth of selection, not mindless accumulation.

This process of selecting and analysing that which can be profitable is what planned economies can’t do. In order for it to work, people need to freedom to manage their own money and change jobs. If they are not free to make a profit from an opportunity, you will not be able to compel them to even spot it. The effort of moving their eyes to see will have been spent in watching the planner’s whip.