[grinnbearit]

Its not a fair comparison.

Businesses have a single, all important goal, to generate a profit so a top down plan can and does work.

People on the other hand have different and changing values. Money is a distributed consensus system to figure out how to satisfy them. Markets help to do this more efficiently.

[eli_gottlieb]

>People on the other hand have different and changing values. Money is a distributed consensus system to figure out how to satisfy them. Markets help to do this more efficiently.

How is this substantively different from just calling human beings (or perhaps "rational" human beings?) money-maximizers and pretending we don't even need particular items to be bought and sold as long as economic transactions take place?

What you're proposing sounds far too vulnerable to the "Disneyland with no children" scenario.

[grinnbearit]

Oops, that wasn't clear, money is a distributed consensus system to figure out how to satisfy _their values_. You earn money from people when you satisfy their values, and spend money to get yours satisfied.

I do think that people are "value-maximisers", short or long term is irrelevant. Being rational isn't really important either, people do what they believe will satisfy their values, even if it doesn't end up helping.