To understand the power of prices as a method of communicating knowledge, imagine that the day before the earthquake, the entirety of the global copper industry stopped being a market institution and was instead given over to be under the command of a specialized agency, meaning production is allocated without any recourse to prices. How would such an agency react to the earthquake? Of all the many copper producers worldwide, how would they decide which producers should increase their production and by how much? In a price system, each firm's own management will look at the prices of copper
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