The problem is, the Austrians don't acknowledge the true problems the knowledge problem incurs for capitalism, or that any other workaround can do anything abou

The problem is, the Austrians don't acknowledge the true problems the knowledge problem incurs for capitalism, or that any other workaround can do anything about it. They think the only signalling channel available to human beings is prices. This model of capitalism only produces the best outcome if the people making decisions can observe the costs of the outcomes of their decisions. Let's say a super powerful alien has planted a bomb on the earth that will destroy the whole planet. It then tells the whole of humanity that certain actions they take will count down the bomb, but the bomb only updates it's counter once every hundred years. The bomb has a quite large counter, so it not really known when doomsday is. The world's scientists, even politicians, authenticate and acknowledge the alien's message. However, since the true date of doomsday can't be determined, and the connection between actions and the bomb don't update the clock for 100 years, it is hard to convince anyone to change their economic activity. That is, it is hard to PRICE-IN the new information about the bomb even though the knowledge is available. Thus, even when concrete knowledge is available, people will make time-preference decisions to defer the pricing until later generations when it reaches a crisis rather than amortizing it over time. This is perfectly rational, but it also leads to globally non-optimal solutions. I consider myself a libertarian and fully believe that capitalism is the best system for free people to optimally allocate resources given a set of constraints. When I don't believe is that the only way these constraints should be imposed is by purely "natural" means. Like if a fire or asteroid strike destroyed a critical natural resource, the price would rise and Austrians would say the new price is a fine and natural response to the new constraint. But if the government were to impose a tax on the resource to raise it's price similarly in order to limit it's use, somehow that's not ok. Capitalism has unfactored costs because property rights can't be applied everywhere, or the coordination cost of some property rights are too high. Ergo, these cause distortions in the market. Thus, I favor a mixed economy. A mostly capitalistic society that acts through collaboration to reign in egregious externalities. (BTW, those just don't include environmental externalities, but also externalities that come from human costs, for example, the costs of inequality, poverty, illiteracy, etc) That so many people find even minimal social welfare or regulation disagreeable I find rather confusing. I mean, if you agree that you should pay for the use of property, and that usage fees should be paid for usage of common infrastructure of property, then why throw a hissy fit over say, gas or carbon taxes? Isn't your car spewing exhaust an initialization of force against me since I have to breath it? Shouldn't you have to pay a usage free to dump into the atmosphere which you don't own? How can it be justified that there should be no regulation of this when tort is impossible against the individual actors?