IT is an increasingly obvious fact of contemporary American life that the computer is having a pervasive influence on the way we work and live. What is not so obvious is that the computer is beginning to challenge some of the most widely held assumptions about the nature of our economic system. Specifically, the invention of the microprocessor has helped to make obsolete some of the most common objections which the free market system has faced during the last several generations.
Capitalism leads to excessive market concentration.
This criticism is at least as old as Marx himself. Capitalism, it is said, inevitably leads to monopolistic concentrations in each industry which ruthlessly suppress the competition and which leave the consumer at the mercy of a few powerful producers. The rich get richer, and the poor get children. An increasingly stratified society, with the poor at the mercy of the wealthy ruling classes, with little hope of upward social mobility - such is the popular image of the results of the free market. It should be noted, of course, that the criticism of excessive concentration of the means of production boomerangs against the socialist critic.