[fatbird]

The field of moral philosophy has extensive literature on exactly this subject. The NYTimes has an 'ask an ethicist' column. Every hospital has an ethics board with prepared guidelines on patient triage in times of crisis.

That the accepted answer to this question has become "who has the most money?" is a victory for... well, the people with the most money, so I guess we can call this a sterling example of the effects of income inequality. The vast majority not only don't have the majority of the money; they don't even have the moral standing of "legitimate" need.

[someguydave]

The only alternative to “highest bidder wins” is “third party decides”. If people need charity, seeking that charity should be a private matter, not one enforced out the barrel of a gun by uninformed third parties.

[fatbird]

Except the whole point of human governance is to delegate that enforcement to a third party that is a just and neutral arbiter. Unless you want to revert to a state of nature and anarchy without laws or money, you're going to have that third party, and if you have it, then you have other options than "highest bidder", which is itself a value choice enforced on other, non-consenting citizens at the the point of a gun.

[quotemstr]

Too much delegation to a third party is called a command economy and history is full of examples of that approach not working, examples going all the way back to the palace economies of the ancient Minoans. The problem is that no third party has enough information or the right incentives to decide fully who should produce what when --- the problem is called "the calculation problem" and has a huge literature. Decentralizing resource allocation decisions using pricing is the only approach that's been shown to work.

[fatbird]

There's a whole lot of daylight between unregulated capitalism and command economies.