What happens when a child would rather work for food now than go to school and improve future income potential? Government ensuring that children have food and can't work so that they will focus on increasing future earning potential results in a better society than one where there is no government intervention, and thus some number of children have to work now instead of focusing on future earning potential, meaning that throughout their lifetime they will contribute less to society than they could have.
This is one example where pure capitalism is not the most effective.
Even if this is what society would revert to once it ran out of already trained individuals, it would be cyclic and would cause entire generations to be lost as it would always be preferable to hire some adult who has basic training over a child who needs to be built from the ground up in basics.
Consider the simple case of a programmer. Who would hire a child who would take years to train (as they would need to learn not only programming, but math and reading and writing, among other fields of knowledge)? Even if the child would work for free for those years of training (which would be problematic for other reasons, but assuming they would anyways), it is still not worth it because the cost of training other than salary would make hiring no one a far better choice.
It costs a lot to train a child from scratch and they offer no benefits except in the longest of terms, so people would always hire from elsewhere, such as children who had parents rich enough to afford them basic education costs out of pocket.
Apprenticeship would work well in today's world if you start after the basic education has been completed before specialized education begins, so that it would be quick enough to turn apprentices into employees who could produce value. But this would be later high school or early college; maybe earlier for simpler trades. It will not (and historically did not) work well for younger children with more educationally demanding jobs.
Until the resource is clean air that you can pollute for free without a central planner to limit such pollution.
Soviet rivers were some of the most polluted in the world.
A free-market has much stricter limits on pollution than any crony government agency.
Unicorns are also pretty awesome - unfortunately, they seem to suffer from the fatal defect of there not being even a single instance of such a thing in consensual reality.
That sounds even move elusive than the unicorns
I agree whole-heartedly that the free market is an awesome, powerful, often-counterintuitively-effective thing.
But isn't there something to be said for some forms of central planning? Theory of the firm, multicellular organisms sending themselves to the moon, the empirical adaptive fitness of lumbering nation-states over freemen upon the land, etc.
I'm pretty far right, but I see a lot of problems with the free market.
None of this is to imply that capitalism has not been hacked. It is to imply that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the hacking from guardrails.
EDIT: Oh wait, you're not the same person.
I come from a formerly socialist economy(India). Central planning is a scheme to create bullshit jobs which don't have to exist at the first place. This distract funds and human resources from other competing higher priority work.
Every thing is state planned starting from detergent to air planes. All services are mediocre and everything is in a state of stagnation and slow decay.
It's pretty well established that capitalism works best with a regulatory state that can correct market failures and enforce private property laws.
Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability.
The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planning.