Intertemporal arbitrage: buying corn when there’s a bumper crop and selling it when there’s a drought. How do we get rid of that? Either time travel or giving everyone lots of storage space and prior knowledge of all the goods he will ever need and their future abundance/scarcity time series.
Price signals arising from trade are also an incentive for consuming less of / producing more of scarce things to make them less scarce. Without the incentives of prices we’d need some other way of enforcing rationing of the finite capacity of the iron mines and communicating each person’s marginal utility for iron. A borg hivemind.
Intertemporal arbitrage: buying corn when there’s a bumper crop and selling it when there’s a drought. How do we get rid of that? Either time travel or giving everyone lots of storage space and prior knowledge of all the goods he will ever need and their future abundance/scarcity time series.
Price signals arising from trade are also an incentive for consuming less of / producing more of scarce things to make them less scarce. Without the incentives of prices we’d need some other way of enforcing rationing of the finite capacity of the iron mines and communicating each person’s marginal utility for iron. A borg hivemind.