That was my thought as well. Asimov is looking eerily prescient in this regard nowadays. Otoh, I remember an old Russian film that had as part of the plot the twists, turns, and hoops an entrepreneur had to jump through just to be able to legally sell what was a clearly superior type of glass for windows. I suspect that back in the bad old days this sort of thing went on a lot more frequently than would be casually supposed and us moderns have just clean forgotten about it.

There were once good reasons for thinking Capitalism superior to the alternatives, and we tend not to think about that too much.