If it's ever going to scale up though or deal with more important things like transport, I think markets and prices are a good way to make it happen.
It's the only way to make almost anything happen that doesn't involve some kind of charity. You can have people with guns force others to do things, but it will never compete with the efficiency of people doing things they want to be doing. It's as simple as that.
Prices aren't just about incentives though, they're mostly useful for information. If you have prices then it's like a constant survey where every person using your service, every person supplying it, and every person who could be using those resources for something else are constantly updating you with details about how valuable/not valuable your work is compared to everything else.
Pretty hard to beat that. It's not necessary for very tight knit communities like a family where you can just read someone's facial expression, but for anything bigger it's extremely useful.
In an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, consumers aren't rational by and large, they don't have access to the information necessary to make informed purchasing decisions, and a sizeable chunk of them would not be able to process that information if it was available. Still, it's the best we've got.
Hmmm, well "value" is a subjective thing to begin with so I'm not sure how rationality would factor into it, but sure, plenty of idiots out there.
Still, it's the best we've got.
True.
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