Capitalism failed to deliver (catalyzed by resorting to force in WWI)
"If goods don t cross borders, armies will." - Frédéric Bastiat
The most perverse being the concept of property rights, being a human right.
Property rights are required for capitalism to function. How can someone agree to trade something that isn't his?
I would argue you we don't need Capitalism, we need something new something better, we need a hybrid of individualism, Laissez-faire markets, and to address Marx's (and Alpaca John's and my) concerns with Property. IE: effectively he who has a monopoly on the land rights controls the labour.
Pure Capitalism has failed with the pre WWI power States dividing up all the Land in the world.
The resulting "Victors" of WWI failed to create a Global economy with symmetrical trade benefits based on productivity, John Maynard Keynes saw the global inequality and resulting conflicts and predicted WWII would be a result. Keynes economic insight saw him alienated after WWI, he worked on a solution independently, and by chance WWII was largely driven by his economic predictions, he was the Man with the solution to the problem after WWII.
The resulting compromise of the 2 World Wars was more diversity and individual State interests (& the UN), in effect free market among states, and socialism to manage the markets within the State.
WWI was a power struggle to control recourses, WWII was a power struggle to control trade, It looks like we are in a currency war now, and the net result looks like the players in the game are new with the goal to collapse nations and implement a new centrally controlled Fiat Currency as a global reserve and have control over trade and recourses, only this time the forses are not just States but the Multinationals Alpaca John is concerned about, the market brand monopolies who control recourses, and WTO trade policies. They know no Boarders; they get there power from their proximity to the big central banks and new money pre inflation or trade imbalances and in imbalances in legislation in different regions.
Also, it's astonishing how the biggest corporations on planet earth seem to have no problems with these economies of scale you are mentioning, isn't it? Even though that flawless theory is based on such elaborate research:
I think you are confusing the cause, I don't see free market as the problem, I see the " biggest corporations on planet", as having leveraged the economic system to their advantage, using existing Monetarist policy and resulting fanatical instruments.
This is a result of a prevention of Laissez-faire Markets controlled by a Central Bank.
In effect we are seeing the best feature of capitalism hybridised with the worst feature of Marxism A controlled Central Bank.
In short people who have new ideas often just stop having old ideas.
In effect we need to mimic the systems we see come from out of Nature, taking the most effective free market ideals and hybridise them with insights and understanding of Marx's concern with how property is owned.