[schuyler2d]

Right, but for functional markets it turns out the marginal opportunity cost is not good enough.

Most famously interest rates without some government (or other, in the case of Crypto) hand in distribution and projected distribution, the market can fail (everyone is encouraged to hoard).

In Stiglitz' case (not looking it up, but from memory), used car markets fail. While the marginal net opportunity cost is what the price yields, it creates a negative feedback loop where people that have a used car that's more valuable than is verifiable exit the market, and then you get .... all the more 'lemons' -- i.e. only bad cars). Dealerships are one way to correct for that information loss, but markets don't always value sufficiently the information that will solve it.

We can be a bit more smug/hopeful nowadays, because information is a lot more easily aggregated/hosted. But we have to recognize the .... value of those components.