One reason that a lot of very intellectual people express a skepticism of capitalism is because so often you see very successful who aren't very bright. It's typical to see a small-to-medium business owner worth $20 million, who's maybe above average intelligence, but nowhere near the brain power of say a physics PhD who's grinding out postdocs at $45k/year.

I think one reason for that is because the market price system already does a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting. In many cases the market gives you very transparent signals about relative cost and scarcity of resources. For a typical entrepreneur, it's often just about putting in the hustle, grit, and risk tolerance to convert low-priced inputs into high-priced outputs.

For example, I can pretty clearly identify that my area needs a car wash. A lot of homes were built in this zip code recently, and there's no car wash to service a new, large market. The car wash business model is pretty easy to project. With a tiny bit of research I can easily figure out prices, wages, rents, etc.

Opening and running a successful car wash would not be a hard intellectual problem. What it would be is a hard pain-in-the-ass problem. The challenge of owning a car wash isn't solving differential equations. It's waking up to an emergency call at 6 am that your bathroom's flooding, and half your staff called out sick because they're hung over.