Or we could move away from pricing everything and the neoliberal obsession to turn everything into a market, and restructure our economy to provide everyone with their basic material needs, regardless of how much income they have.
even if we restructure everything to meet human basic needs, pricing will still be part of the equation. finite resources means value has to be attached to materials.
Value and price are not the same thing. Money is a form of access control which limits the availability of scarce resources to those people and organisations which have enough funds. It also collapses the value of all things to a single dimension. There are other ways to decide how much of something is produced and how it is distributed, for example participatory economics.
Money isn't just a form of rationing, it creates the scarcity it claims to solve.
A neoliberal economy wastes talent and skill in much the same way an ICE wastes most of the energy from the gas it burns. Vested interests clog up the engine and keep it from running cleanly and efficiently.
This doesn't just create pollution of all kinds - physical, social, political, and ecological - which makes the environment a very unpleasant space for most humans.
It also puts a hard cap on the maximum speed, which is nowhere close to what's possible.
pricing is the exercise of determining value, even in a non monetary economy (think barter or contribution) you still need to price the value of materials and time. obviously money creates secondary effects which are not related to value due to arbitrages and other effects, but I do not believe you can have finite resources without determining value, which is what I meant by pricing.
We still haven't found a better resource allocation model than pricing.
We have tried central planning, and it resulted in horrendous living standards (as compared to the western world), queues all-night-long that you had to wait in if you wanted to buy bread in the morning, "if you're not stealing from your employer, you're stealing from your family" being adopted as a common proverb, and the whole system basically running (for some definition of running) on bribes, favors and theft. Communism finally fell around '89 in most of Eastern Europe, and we're still recovering.
Perhaps you could solve some of these points with computer-aided optimization and dystopian AI-powered mass surveillance, but is that really what we want?
In my view, the problem isn't capitalism, the problem is the government trying to fix capitalism, but instead making it much harder for small competitors to emerge, effectively causing almost-government-mandated monopolies.
Think about what industries are complained about most in America, and how regulated those industries are. You can't just lay fiber, make medications or help patients without going through a regulatory minefield, mostly for good reasons, but this is why the big providers of these services aren't outcompeted by smaller ones. There's a reason why the mostly-unregulated big tech is considered to be one of the most trustworthy industries among most (non ideologically motivated) consumers, far surpassing any political party.
Capitalism is sometimes bad, central planning is worse, but heavily regulated capitalism is the worst of them all.
A key problem with unfettered capitalism is the tragedy of the commons. If left alone rogue/selfish actors will destroy that which belongs to all of us and is required to live (see nature). How do you propose to solve this without "benign" interference?
If your property generates air pollution, noise pollution, smells, unclean water, radio interference etc, you get taxed and/or have to offset the effects (e.g. by planting trees).
You can do this with very simple, straightforward regulation, in a way that is very easy to understand, doesn't require an army of lawyers to follow and doesn't advantage or disadvantage large companies.
The temptation of exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions to exceptions might be too much for governments to stomach, though.
