i find quite ironic whenever i see a highly upvoted comment here complaining about capitalism because for sure i don't see yc existing in any other type of economy.
However markets also have limits. A power company competing for your business is largely a farce, since the power lines to your home will not change. A cable company in America is almost certainly a functional monopoly, and that fact is reflected in their quality of service. Infrastructure of all sorts makes for piss-put markets because true competition is all but impossible, and even if it does kind of work, it’s inefficient. A customer must become knowledgeable in some way to have a ghost of a clue what they’re buying, or trust entirely dubious information from marketing. And, even if somehow everything is working up to this point, corporations are, above all, cost cutters and if you put one in charge of an area where it feels as though customers have few if any choices and the friction to change is high, they will immediately begin degrading their quality of services to save money in the budget.
And this is only from first principles, we have so many other things that could be discussed from mass market manipulation to the generous subsidies of a stunning variety that basically every business at scale enjoys to the rapacious compensation schemes that have become entirely too commonplace in the executive room, etc etc etc.
To put it short: I have no issue at all with capitalism operating in non-essential to life industries. My issue is all the ways it’s infiltrated the essential ones and made them demonstrably worse, less efficient, and more expensive for every consumer.
The competitive landscape where consumers vote for the best products with their purchasing decisions is simply not a sustainable equilibrium.
The ability to accumulate capital (I.e. “capitalism”) leads to regulatory protectionism through lobbying, bribery, etcetera.
The biggest and most salient critique of liberal capitalism as we now exist under is that it requires far too many of the "right people" to be in positions of power; it presumes good faith where it shouldn't, and fails to reckon with bad actors as what they are far too often, the modern American Republican party being an excellent example (but far from the only one).
There is a saying that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.