Capitalism is not a model to allocate scarce resources, although there is good reason to believe it is more efficient than socialism. It is a system to allocate rivalrous resources in a system that uses a minimum of political involvement. Why is an economic allocation preferable to a political allocation? Because in order to use your economic power, you have to give it away (or at least, offer to give it away). This is not true for political allocation: cronies enrich each other often without giving away anything; popularity can snowball as people join bandwagons... So political allocation is a more dangerous system for creating haves- and have-nots, widening the gap between the chosen and the left behind, than economic allocation.