they teach you at school that markets stimulate innovation, but they don't. what they do is enforce mediocrity. the reason for that is that producers of anything - art, science, commodities - need to scale up to maximize profit. so, what overpowers is a regression to the mean; everything becomes average, and anything that excels gets phased out as ineffective. because, after all, the purpose is to maximize profit, by selling as many things as can be sold to as many idiots as can be marketed to, not to be the best or the brightest or the most efficient. where innovation exists, it exists only to dumb everything down.
the left has always understood this, but it doesn't make the argument, it consistently concedes the point. and, it should stop doing that - it should go out there and argue against market economics not because it enforces "rugged individualism" (which is a bunch of nonsense...) but because it's a system of forced collectivism that enforces mediocrity, a race to the bottom and a regression to the mean and a mass stupidification of the culture, to maximize profit at the expense of individual expression.
but, this is one of the reasons i'm an anarchist and not a collectivist. i have my own tradition with this, that goes through wilde, kropotkin and bakunin, and links up with enlightenment classical liberalism. this tradition is viciously anti-collectivist, and was the main intellectual opponent to marxism. i'm where the anarchists always were, in arguing that the purpose of socialism is to maximize individualist concepts of positive liberty - in direct opposition to market capitalism and christian collectivism, alike.