"The big advantage of capitalism is that it actually allows and enables failure."

"WeWork recently slinked into bankruptcy the boring, old-fashioned way, after years of decline following a spectacular flameout by the overhyped office-space “co-working” company in 2019. This failure, combined with the collapse of other venture capital favorites such as Theranos and FTX—whose respective founders were recently convicted of massive fraud—has some people declaring that it demonstrates the failure of capitalism.
But a failure like WeWork [a provider of co-working office spaces] is actually proof that capitalism is working. The very size and suddenness of its collapse is a demonstration of capitalism’s self-correcting mechanisms. Nothing fails like capitalism, and that’s [one] secret of its success...

    "The fact that venture capitalists try many ventures that don’t pan out is not a failure of capitalism. It’s one of its features. This is true even if some of the failures are predictable and even obvious, at least in hindsight.
    "Partly this is a good thing because a fool and his money are soon parted. Capitalists who become overconfident based on their past successes will make bad investments, and soon they will have less capital to misuse. But this freewheeling attitude toward new ventures is also necessary because sometimes a dubious enterprise manages to defy the doubts and pay off.
    "Was WeWork losing money? Well, so was Amazon for most of its early years, when people used to quip that the company was a vast wealth transfer from Wall Street to the American consumer, blowing through billions of dollars of investors’ money year after year just so we could get used to shopping online.
    "Did WeWork have a charismatic but mercurial CEO? Well, so did Apple, which briefly got rid of Steve Jobs but found it couldn’t do without his vision. (And so does Tesla, which may still turn out to be a problem.) People can’t always tell ahead of time what is a stupid business idea and what is a brilliant one, and who is the next great innovator versus who is a con artist. Over the long run, it’s good to have an economic system that spreads its bets around and values dynamism and experimentation over caution....

    "And the big advantage of capitalism is that it actually allows and enables failure.... 'In the left’s view, market crashes and recessions reveal the real essence of the capitalist system. In reality, they are just temporary glitches and setbacks in a larger story of persistent innovation and growth.' ...

    "There is a cognitive bias in how we evaluate capitalism. The bias is that we see all the failures in the capitalist economy because we are allowed to see them. It is precisely because capitalism allows ventures to fail that we see these flamboyant crack-ups as they crumble to nothing.
    "By contrast, under the alternatives to capitalism—various forms of state-managed economy—failed programmes continue for years or decades and are constantly being propped up."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'Nothing Fails Like Capitalism'