> Price signals are an important part of ensuring that resources go where they're needed, but this also sort of assumes that everyone has an equal capacity to p

> Price signals are an important part of ensuring that resources go where they're needed, but this also sort of assumes that everyone has an equal capacity to pay. Technically, neither of those things are true. An efficient market only ensures that resources aren’t wasted - that they won’t be allocated in ways that are worse for everyone. There are still (infinitely) many efficient outcomes where some people could be better off at the expense of others. Defining ‘need’, especially when it comes to trade offs between individuals is an extremely fraught and unsolved (and demonstrably unsolvable) problem in economics.