[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?