Who's "value to society" people's values vary that's why we have markets so people can decide what they value by deciding to buy it.
That's a difficult question to answer generally, however it's also clearly not one that markets "solve." That's easy to see with the example of addictive drugs (which the market shows can be very profitable), unless you're willing to argue there's social value in destroying many people's lives through addiction.
That's not to say that financial value and social value aren't sometimes aligned, it just that you can't assume the former implies the latter.
One little thing I find annoying is that whenever someone points out some issue with free markets, someone always seems to reply with something that amounts to "have you considered free markets?" Whatever the problem, markets are the solution, even if the problem stems from markets themselves.
The Soviet Union had serious problems, but it's a mistake to reason from that to the conclusion that markets are in some way ideal. They have their own problems, and we don't have access to an ideal system, so we have to try to deal with individual problems and make tradeoffs.
Maybe Free Markets were the best you could do with the quantitative decision-making tools available to Stalin, and maybe central planning with modern AI/ML/Operations Research techniques would be more successful than a free-market approach.
Or maybe, the Soviet Union would have done just fine if there were no United States trying to thwart it at every turn.
- Arthur Jensen (Network, 1976)
Beyond that, the Soviet economy was solidly middling as far as the world was concerned.
As troksky said "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."
Who gets to decide what is allocated to whom? Giving these starting conditions it's no wonder in every single attempt at this has resulted in a death toll in the millions. Nothing the USA did from the outside forced these countries to starve, imprison and murder their own people. Why didn't this happen in the USA? Or the rest of the west? Why only in regimes that tried to control more aspects of an individuals life then ever attempted before? Most of the argument I am making is a poor rehash of "the road to serfdom".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299215.The_Road_to_Serfd...
Blaming the west for the terrors of Soviet Russia is as mistaken as blaming the allies for what the Nazis did in Europe.
I’d be surprised if there aren't neo-Nazis that argue exactly that, just as modern Leninists argue that Soviet Communism might have worked out great for everyone if it wasn't for the USA.
No. That, along with the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Italian fascism, and...was among the indirect causes.
Beyond that, the argument of starvation is flawed, because Russia in the market system had worse famine than the USSR, and crucially, the USSR ended famine in the Russian Empire, not started it. You can argue there were unnecessary famines, and you'd be right, but saying that famine is an inevitable component of the Soviet system is wrong because there were one/two, at the beginning, and then none after.
The actual limit to Central Control assuming that the people doing the central control are willing to let consumer goods follow what people want is data and the ability to process it. In the USSR this was very low - data collection was manual and plans were updated every 5 years. The bureaucracy opposed every attempt to improve the situation as that would usurp their power. Beyond that the freedom that individuals can have as far as what to buy and which jobs to build is only limited by what others are willing to work for.
It's also not true that they attempted to control more aspects of someone's life as ever before. Feudal states had much more control than the Soviet state on their inhabitants. Some capitalist states had more control.
There are arguments to be made here. A poor rehash of a poor book written by an author who openly admitted that he started with conclusions and worked backwards from there is not one.
The reality is much more complex than market=good everything else=bad. Heck, even the Soviet weren't always opposed to markets. Their ideology didn't even explicitly oppose markets, only class distinction in production.
This is not correct. The authority is there, it's just less visible.
Market forces are extremely unequal: a small percentage of humanity, e.g. 0.1% influence 90% of the value of the housing market in all popular cities in developed countries.