Barkley, are you going to use labor markets? If so, you will get highly unequal labor incomes that are also quite inequitable. Michael Jordan will get $20 million per year and a nursery school teacher will get $20 thousand. If you don't permit labor markets to determine labor income, they you will have wage rates that certainly do NOT represent marginal revenue products and accurate social opportunity costs. But then the labor component of the costs of items will not reflect social opportunity costs of items. So, equity and efficiency are fundamentally at odds in market socialist economies. And no, markets do NOT provide what people want. In a trivial sense they do. If one seller of shoes is making ugly ones and another is making attractive ones, the market will pressure the former to adapt or depart. But in a much more important sense markets mis-price goods because of extensive external effects, and provide incentives for profit maximizers to externalize costs as much as it provides them incentives to improve product quality. And then there is the problem that the behavioral roles that markets force us to play are hardly the kind of lesson we hope our children learn in play school -- that is equitable cooperation -- rather than advancing our own interests at the expense of others.
