The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there's nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.

Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.

The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.