There are actually good counter examples where central planning wins. They are often contentious like Medicine, but the advantage markets bring is robustness not effecency. In a famine market economies have some people starve more and others starve less.
You can't just assume a famine starts and then look what happens. The whole point of pricing signals is that it changes what gets produced, making shortages less likely to occur in the first place.
We have thousands of years of history with a huge range of causes. But, there are a large number of famines across all economic systems.
Re:The queen does not rule
by witty_username on Friday December 23, 2016 @01:30PM
(#13246378)
Why is price discovering meaningless? It only seems like that on the surface.
Re:The queen does not rule
by JumpCrisscross on Friday December 23, 2016 @01:59PM
(#13246544)
I was recapitulating the quote. The ants' interactions are not meaningless; their meaning is just difficult to observe from a single interaction. Analogously, one finds intelligent people struggling with the concepts of money and prices.
It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed systems which centralize economic planning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem