[dragonwriter]

> The idea behind prices in a market economy is that they're an information-carrying abstraction.

No, the idea behind prices is that they are what the participants in particular trades think it is worth trading at.

The normative argument for the superiority of laissez-faire economies may involve market prices as an information carrying mechanism, but that normative argument is much newer than market economies, and is not the “idea behind prices in a market economy”. The benefits some people see (or imagine) in something after the fact are not the underlying purpose of the thing.

[dinom]

> > The idea behind prices in a market economy is that they're an information-carrying abstraction.

> No, the idea behind prices is that they are what the participants in particular trades think it is worth trading at.

Why are these two things mutually exclusive? Aren't they, in fact, mutually dependent?

[dragonwriter]

> Why are these two things mutually exclusive?

They aren’t. They are different, and one is actually the “idea behind prices in a market economy”, and the other is an academic argument, observing the fact of price setting in a market economy, for why price setting in a market economy is valuable to others besides the direct participants in the individual exchanges.

> Aren’t they, in fact, mutually dependent?

No, there is a one-way dependency between them. The normative argument depends on the fact, but not vice-versa.

[dinom]

If we accept this to be true, why and how should it be used as an argument for economic interventionism?