I'm not sure what the "free market" has to do with it. Capitalism, communism, feudalism, socialism, etc.. always end with the majority of money and power concentrated with the few.
It's just human behavior to be selfish.
It's just human behavior to be selfish.
So I think some kind of sociological argument makes more sense (I don't know what that would be though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
> Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.
Is it? If you have N participants in a market and a bunch of investment opportunities that are on average net negative, the person with the most money will take the most opportunities resulting in their relative worth increasing the most. The endgame for this is one person with all the money. Works for N=2 and N≃infinity.
It doesn't happen in (some? most?) small communities because of specific things that aren't present in big communities.
Of course, said -isms require either an unbroken chain of morally righteous people with absolute power being in charge of said means of production fairly for the equal enrichment of everyone, or some kind of system of checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing it and preventing corruption from outside the political power structures, the exact formula of which we've yet to figure out.
Personally I'm of the opinion we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and chalk this whole civilization experiment up as a mistake and go back to tribal societies of yestermillennia. Of course, the vast majority of the current human population disagrees with me in that regard and I will admit there are some good things about it, so until that changes I'll be here plugging along like the rest and hoping for better days.
And, of course, capitalism and socialism work best together.