librehab

Communism can be drastically more efficient than capitalism on these fronts. There are still technical debates about socialist planning, but essentially your critique can become a communist critique just by replacing government with multi-national corporation. Large corporations are essentially doing planning since they don't allocate resources within them by internal markets (Sears tried that and it was disastrous) and in real life, corporations try to induce demand with marketing and a lot of the assumptions to make markets and marginalism make sense don't actually function in a real business (e.g. despite "deminishing marginal returns and increasing marginal costs" it costs less not more to build your 1,000,001st car rather than your first). Even in your example of food allocation, a small number of corporations (e.g. Cargill and Kroger), rather than "locals" decide those things. They might not be able to get away with only selling gruel and meal worm paste, but this is a highly consolidated sector (and markets would always lead to that) and the US and "the west" have extreme amounts of food waste. Additionally, local people don't have more control and input in capitalism even in the abstract. There are certain sectors where the capitalist ideology of "voting with your wallet" can approximate local input, but usually that is not the case.

The religious belief that capitalism is efficient and voting with your wallet gives local input comes from the hyper simplistic thought experiments about markets in the abstract or Alice and Bob deciding to trade a widget. The most important and foundational assumption, but is not stated, about efficiency of markets is that everyone has an infinite amount of money, but finite and equal value of a dollar, so willingness to pay only amounts to how much you want/need something. So, we can say that markets allocated resources efficiently, because if this guy didn't buy necessary, life-saving medicine, it must be because he valued $3000 more than his life rather than not having a way to get that sum of money. And then using markets to advocate for Capitalism use neoliberal dodges about making Capitalism about markets, rather than who owns capital and how much control over society and resources they get from owning capital. Additionally, there is Hayek's understanding of the price mechanism as aggregating and computing resource allocation. But this only works as the most crude form of feedback (there is a shortage of this, use less. There is an overabundance of this, so consume more even to the point of wasting it). To say that markets are efficient means that "externalities" don't matter. e.g. "The environment doesn't matter and shouldn't be considered since markets don't naturally price it in, so use more fossil fuels and dump toxic byproducts into the drinking water." Or "well, now that we have been privatizing and have sub-contracting in universities to be more capitalist, there are more middle-men and bureaucrats. So there should be less education, and anyone that gets educated should be in debt for the rest of their lives. this is efficiency"