[quanticle]

    Capitalism responded to market forces and the needs of the customer.

Did it? When? I can't name a single era when "capitalism" (a fuzzy term) actually responded to consumer demands in the way that the parent poster described. Whether it's railroad robber barons screwing over farmers, Ford selling cars with an unacceptable risk of catching fire, or Google arbitrarily deleting people's entire digital identities, large corporations have always treated their customers as a collection of statistical artifacts (to quote another poster elsewhere in this thread).