19th Century Examples:

+ Factories dumped toxic waste into rivers because it was more cost-effective than delivering it to a safe dump site, or to convert it into safe waste.

+ Factories found it more cost effective to beat workers and violently disrupt attempts at union organisation than cave into their demands for safer working conditions and higher wages.

+ Entrepreneurs found it most profitable to mix random herbs and extracts together with grain alcohol and sell it as a cure-all than to spend the time researching those claims and making sure their tincture wasn't poisonous.

20th Century Examples:

+ The stock market crashes because of insider deals and internal corruption, causing major poverty and requiring state intervention in the form of The New Deal.

+ Rather than welcome videocassettes and recordings as a possible avenue to sales and a means to advertise their contracted singers and artists, the Music Industry made a point of propagandising against these technologies, and attempting to litigate against them.

+ This is the era when the DMCA was passed in an effort to stifle the Internet's role in the distribution of copyrighted works. It is also where we see copyright interests start to enter mainstream attention when it is used not to protect an investment and fuel innovation (as was the original purpose of it) but to safeguard an outdated sales model and pre-digital mindset.

21st Century Examples:

+ Digital Rights Management becomes ubiquitous and forces consumers to either deal with it, break it and be illegitimate in the eyes of the law, or take interest in open source software. This was the "market solution" to consumers using digital data in a free and open manner against the wishes of businesses.

+ We start to see the advent of premium content, digital data that exists in your possession but is unlocked (decrypted) when you pay extra money.

+ The market crashes again after Reagan-era policies deregulated businesses, and the United States Government failed to adapt to new ways the market was evolving in the post-internet era.

Pure capitalism is economic anarchism. It might sound like a noble concept, but there are too many fundamental problems with it. It's widely accepted that every society needs a government to regulate its activities; why would anyone think that this doesn't also apply to the economic areas of society?

To add to the list, I'd say that the market fails in encouraging progress and discovery in general. Sure, competition does encourage people to discover and innovate, but since you're doing it for the money rather than for the sake of knowledge itself, your priorities alter your research methods and can introduce bias.

It's also inimical to teamwork. Protection mechanisms like patents, copyrights and commercial secrets stunt the search for knowledge. Imagine how much faster our inventors would be if they had open access to every piece of research that has ever been conducted in their area of study. And imagine that, instead of multiple corporations all coming up with separate solutions to a problem and resulting in a proliferation of redundant inventions, they could put their minds together to find a better solution in a much shorter space of time.