I came to understand in thorough mathematical detail why supply and demand cannot be expected to deliver fair prices or efficient outcomes in many situations. Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.
This is an argument that is not often discussed but should be. It seems everyone jumps to socialism if the free market is criticized without ever considering that any system has limitations. People who lived through the Cold War are especially prone to this!
