Or as we call it 'the US healthcare system'

I’m assuming this is sarcasm. Can you propose an alternative method of measuring need?

It's not sarcasm at all.

Does one person with a million dollars in excess liquidity to spend on water represent a greater "need" than one million people with no liquidity to spare?

Would it be moral for that person to buy more than they need, solely to inflate prices? Would the resulting spot price in the market be in any way a meaningful gauge of the actual need?

Market prices are only one gauge, and they are pretty faulty, easily manipulated one at that.

Next up, you'll probably tell me that story points are a solid basis for predicting delivery times and making decisions about resource allocation.

Please propose a system of distributing goods that is more "moral" or "fair" than the "highest bidder wins".

Provide a UBI so half the population isn't locked out of bidding entirely. The problem with capitalism is that 1% of the population ends up mega-wealthy, and 50% of the population ends up dirt poor, literally unable to afford food. When that happens, the 1% shouldn't get to decide who gets to eat and who gets to starve (by choosing which ones to employ). There should be some form of basic income to ensure everyone has access to some goods, and they can decide which ones to pay more for, and which ones to forego.

In the current situation, if a business owner decides to drop you on the ground, you're literally gonna starve to death in the next month.

> In the current situation, if a business owner decides to drop you on the ground, you're literally gonna starve to death in the next month.

That's not true at all. We have an extensive network of assistance programs. Of course these programs can be better in numerous ways. Nevertheless, nobody is starving in the street in the US.

The field of moral philosophy has extensive literature on exactly this subject. The NYTimes has an 'ask an ethicist' column. Every hospital has an ethics board with prepared guidelines on patient triage in times of crisis.

That the accepted answer to this question has become "who has the most money?" is a victory for... well, the people with the most money, so I guess we can call this a sterling example of the effects of income inequality. The vast majority not only don't have the majority of the money; they don't even have the moral standing of "legitimate" need.

The only alternative to “highest bidder wins” is “third party decides”. If people need charity, seeking that charity should be a private matter, not one enforced out the barrel of a gun by uninformed third parties.

Except the whole point of human governance is to delegate that enforcement to a third party that is a just and neutral arbiter. Unless you want to revert to a state of nature and anarchy without laws or money, you're going to have that third party, and if you have it, then you have other options than "highest bidder", which is itself a value choice enforced on other, non-consenting citizens at the the point of a gun.

Too much delegation to a third party is called a command economy and history is full of examples of that approach not working, examples going all the way back to the palace economies of the ancient Minoans. The problem is that no third party has enough information or the right incentives to decide fully who should produce what when --- the problem is called "the calculation problem" and has a huge literature. Decentralizing resource allocation decisions using pricing is the only approach that's been shown to work.

There's a whole lot of daylight between unregulated capitalism and command economies.

The opinion that charging people out the nose for basic necessities is a bad way to allocate resources isn't the same as being "opposed to money"

100% Correct.

Money is still really important, but it’s dishonest and counterfactual to argue that mere access to liquidity can determine the clearing price for a market.

We know it doesn’t. That’s why we have the Fed.