There are several problems with this argument.
First, you can have prices in a communist economy. The decisionmakers behind the price will be different, obviously, but you can still communicate via price to the consuming public.
Second, some of that information concealed in the price may not be desireable to leave out. For example, the outrageous price of a feathered hat might be due to the impending extinction of the national bird....I think most reasonable people in a country would want to have a say in what happens with that bird and with the commerce that employs it. A more sinister and true to life example comes in falling prices-sometimes the lowered price of a shoe tells you that the value of the lives of the workers making that shoe has plummetted; since the factory went to some hole where it can run machinery that maims and kills easily replaceable workers, you get the same shoe at a lower price.
But did that lower price tell you everything you want to know about the shoe you're buying?
Communists can use pricing to manage their economy, and pricing doesn't always convey the information that most would want to be conveyed.
Edit: There is the added problem that much of the efficiency of pricing may be illusory-if you don't know what drives the price of sugar, for example, and you need sugar...you can't plan your usage and investments accordingly. So in the real world, you actually do need to know about the hurricanes and the factories and all of those other things that drive the price to function anyway...otherwise you would find it impossible to carry out any sort of plan for your own production/consumption, as unexpected changes in price will monkeywrench the works.
>.<
<head in hands>
Our public schools are to blame, I'm sure...
Your arguments are simply wrong.
You can have prices in a socialist economy, very true. As you noted, they would be set by some decision maker.
The problem is that the prices then are simply due to someone's whim.
There are thousands of bits of information that go into the pricing of one single good. That "decision maker" cannot know all the things necessary in order to price it. PERIOD. Full stop.
What happens then? Goods go to waste. People starve because they can't get food because the materials needed for new tractors were used to build a sewer system in east mongolia where 8 people live.
Was the sewer system a good thing? Most assuredly.
Was it more important than growing food so people don't starve? I seriously doubt it.
This is the problem you seem to be unable to grasp: if you take the market out of the prices, things like shortages, changes in demand, surpluses get ignored.
You end up with Marie Antoinette' s statement: "Let them eat cake"
Why did she say this? Not because she didn't care (as people assume). It's because she didn't understand markets. The king had put price controls on bakers in France and when she was told that the peasants couldn't get bread, she said "Let them eat cake" because the king's decree had fixed prices. (I unfortunately cannot remember offhand how it was fixed).
You know what the lower price tells me about the shoe I am buying? It tells me someone can afford a shoe that could not before. It tells me that someone is making better use of the same materials.
As for you having to know how the price of sugar is affected- totally untrue.
If you plan on investing in sugar, it is in your best interest to know how it is affected.
In fact, every person learns a great deal about their specialization (case in point, mine is economics) and is able to tell you a great deal about prices there.
However, I'm willing to bet you cannot tell me what drives the price of silicon chips. I'll bet you can guess, but I know by the fact you are posting that you rely on them. How can you function and plan without knowing what happens to silicon?
I'll also bet you have no idea what goes in the prices of the battery in your car, how the different chemicals are mined and where they come from. Yet you can drive without problem.
INVESTORS will know information about certain prices. They are necessary to equalize prices and prevent massive shortages. It is not necessary for someone in their daily business to know why the prices change.
Also- if you are concerned about how a company is treating their employee: refuse to buy their product. Unless someone has chained that employee to his station or threatened his family, he is working there because it is better than any other option he has.
If you don't like that, I suggest you give him charity rather than suggesting the government should put a gun to my head and tell me I have to support him or else. (Which is what socialism does- try not paying taxes in a socialist economy).
