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@freemo @avlcharlie There is no reason why anyone couldn’t start a worker cooperative (perhaps a single-person one, if they are able to work by themselves) under that system, so I don’t think this objection quite works.

The one thing you don’t have is people who already have a lot of resources coming in and taking over a company to redirect its efforts, but then you are no longer making an argument in favour of markets, but in favour of exactly private ownership of capital, and how that is good directly (with many underlying assumptions, from the supposed meritocracy of capitalism, to the assumption that the best way of making money from an enterprise is to run it as well as possible). This does not require markets in general, but only the ability to buy an enterprise (not even necessarily at a market). As to how well it works in practice – see Twitter, Toys’R’Us, and the general problems stemming from private equity firms. But maybe I’m getting distracted, I’m mostly trying to point out that capitalism is mostly about this form of ownership and not about markets in general (which, while I don’t trust them, are much more defensible as a system imo).