The central banks are instruments of socialism even if they are so-called private companies. They answer to governments. Again not a criticism of capitalism but of big government. Central banks are government-enabled monopolies that do incredible harm changing interest rates from free-market based rates to whatever the fuck basically that they think the rate ought to be. It's a price control like anything else, and it fails massively like every price control in history has.

Capitalism drives innovation and technology faster than any government can. Honestly the only way that government programs can advance technology is by dumping insane amounts of tax dollars into research, again with a massive expertise deficit. The space race caused a great amount of innovation to occur but it wasted insane amounts of resources in doing so. In terms of stifling innovation, that's what governments do when they make it very expensive and difficult to be an entrepreneur or when they divert tax dollars to the research firms of their own choosing, usually for nepotistic or cronyistic reasons instead of merit-based ones. They also stifle innovation when they subsidize ANY industry, including industries of innovation. A solar-power subsidy distorts the market for alternative energy by providing an unnaturally large signal to get into solar when there might be greener innovative pastures to be found in geothermal energy. Meanwhile markets are naturally pushing toward alternative sources. This can be seen in the rapidly increasing price of oil, which governments including the U.S. hilariously subsidize.

Ong said that capitalism discourages the use of abundant resources in favor of those that are scarce. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Oil is incredibly abundant and cheap compared with the alternatives, that is why it is the prevalent source. Capitalism doesn't encourage scarcity, it only recognizes its existence. The prices of abundant resources quickly approach zero in a free market as providers continue to innovate and reduce their costs to compete with other providers. The costs of abundant goods are a pretty good sign of how free and developed an economy is. I'm currently living in Cambodia where electricity is the 2nd most expensive on the planet, and drinking water costs about 8 times as much as adjacent Thailand.