https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursion...
That's a ridiculous statement, of course, but it demonstrates that the economic notion of value can diverge wildly from most other reasonable notions of value. The seemingly inoffensive "economic value = value" approximation is actually a trojan horse used by libertarians to sneak the more objectionable aspects of their theories past casual observers and put a tautological halo over markets and their preferences.
It's a point worth keeping in mind when considering complaints that X system doesn't optimize economic value.
The price mechanism means that people have to make trade offs, and for anyone living outside of poverty, that's often a good thing.
To use a simple example, if you're a gamer you may want both a PS4 and an Xbox One, but if you only have the money to buy one, you have to choose which one you'd rather have. If you remove the price mechanism you've absolved the individual from making that choice, and you'll get greater demands for material goods as a result.
Resources should be allocated where they are needed the most. The price mechanism doesn't do that. If you don't have any money, a system based on the price mechanism doesn't know you exist no matter how great your need.
Okay, but putting aside shared ownership and artificially limiting choice, how do you set limits on consumption?
Let's use a different example. Someone owns a car that they maintain themselves. Their car breaks down, but instead of requesting a new part to fix it they request a new car. How does the government choose which is the appropriate action to take? Before you answer, consider that this is just one decision out of millions that a government would have to make within the space of a month.
If a lot of people think new cars are important, then a computer can allocate a lot of resources into making new cars. This would of course mean we'd have less resources for everything else and peoples needs start changing as a result. If you can easily get a new car but notice that the quality of healthcare is decreasing, the next time the system asks your opinion on resource allocation you vote for more healthcare.
So in your example I guess there would be a democratically decided amount of resources dedicated to making new cars. If that amount is high, the computer would probably give him a new car as soon as one was available. If it's low, society would be fixing and sharing cars and using the freed resources on more important things.
We'd need to test what works best. I don't have the details of such a system because it doesn't exist. All I'm trying to say is that we could come up with other ways to allocate resources than the price mechanism with our current level of technology. What I just came up with is just one way you might go about doing it, I'm sure we could figure out a working system. Of course such a system would have it's own faults, but I believe we could come up with something better than the current system, where the "needs" of a billionaire are more important than the needs of a million people in poverty.
The thing is, I used to think along similar limes to you. When I was in my 20s I saw the Zeitgeist films and found the ideas behind the resource-based economy to be compelling. A way to meet everyone's needs without relying on money. However, as time went on and I thought more about what living in such a society would be like, I saw that it wasn't the answer I was looking for.
To give you some idea of what changed my mind, I'd suggest we look at variety. As the phrase goes, variety is the spice of life. Centrally planned economies, whether resource-based or otherwise, would see variety as inefficient and attempt to cut down on variety. You gave an example of it earlier when I asked about the PS4 and Xbox One. Whilst it's true we don't "need" variety, it is something we collectively want.
For all its flaws, money gives people the chance to make choices based on what's best for them, with far fewer restrictions on what's possible. These days, I'd much rather see something along the lines of universal basic income than a resource-based economy, though I recognise UBI has its flaws too.
Sometimes too much choice can even be a bad thing. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/21/choice-...
I believe people would quickly get used to less variety. But if variety isn't just a product of a system based on competition and people really desire it, there are no rules against it in a planned economy based on direct democracy. People could suggest and vote for different types of the same thing if they feel there's a need for such a thing.
money gives people the chance to make choices based on what's best for them, with far fewer restrictions on what's possible.
Most people have quite large restrictions on what they can choose due to the amount of money they have. Sure if you're wealthy enough you probably have more choice in the current system, but for the majority of people I believe a planned economy would increase the amount options they have in their lives.
Capitalism frequently also results in economic waste and artificial shortages, it's not like communism has the monopoly on that.