>Asking what should replace Capitalism is a very reasonable question. The problem is that lots of people don't actually explore this question in a spirit of intellectual honesty.
It is not a reasonable question because inquiries into this matter start from the assumption that capitalism is a conscious creation by man (and thus replaceable) and not something that, through the laws of human action, evolves spontaneously between free individuals.
>Right off the bat, you insist that any alternative to capitalism is necessarily the whim of a "central planner", and go on to suggest that:
Yes, because an alternative to capitalism (the interactions between free individuals in a market) necessitates the use of coercion to enforce, coercion that will inevitably be directed by someone.
>But of course, Socialism does not prescribe a central authority (although many theories suggest one), and an exchange market is not the only way to collectively make decisions.
Let us assume that a collective has made a decision to produce pineapples and not bananas, what happens to the guy who likes bananas and funds the production of bananas and refuses to participate in the production of pineapples?
>The market doesn't tell us why things cost what they do. Proponents of a free market argue that anything the market values is inherently valuable, even if that seems unintuitive. However, I think when many many people are unhappy with the priorities of the market, we should perhaps consider this claim with more scrutiny.
No, and we will never ever know why things cost the way they do, but we can draw some reasonable conclusions based on things like supply and demand. Ultimately however prices are the result of the choices of billions of people in an enormous decentralised system (the market), and it is literally impossible to objectively know the chain of choices that led to one specific good being priced one dollar or ten dollars. Doing so would require knowing every single choice that every man, woman, and child makes every single moment as well as taking into account the choices they didn't choose, the ordinal scale of which is quite literally infinite for every individual.
>Proponents of a free market argue that anything the market values is inherently valuable, even if that seems unintuitive.
No, the subjective theory of value does not say that, in fact it says the opposite: it is impossible to determine the objective value of goods since they come from the subjective choices of free individuals. Prices come pretty damn close though. Ironically, it is Marx that said that value can be determined objectively through the lens of the labour theory of value where the amount of labor put into a good is what determines its value. That, most certainly, is unintuitive.