thought you might find this interesting :) apparently a centrally planned economy using linear programming can be functionally equivalent to a market economy, at least theoretically!

Friedrich Hayek refined his position in response to this new argument. He did this in a series of seminal articles (1937, 1940, 1945, 1948, 1968) where he essentially argued that a state-run economy could not achieve greater efficiency in resource allocation than a capitalist one largely because the information conveyed by the price-mechanism of a market economy was greater than the information any planner could possibly acquire. This led on to the work on information and self-organization that dominated the second half of Hayek's career.

Among the more interesting results of this debate was the adoption, in the Soviet Union itself, of the techniques suggested by Lange. This led to the development of linear programming by Leonid Kantorovich which demonstrated that efficient allocation in a planned economy required effectively the same of use of prices as in a competitive market economy. This was also discovered by Tjalling C. Koopmans in his formal discussion of efficiency in a multi-market scenario. In their conclusion, that a collectivist economy could do no better than a private market system in the idealized Walrasian world - but it might also do no worse. In short, they confirmed Barone's original conjecture - at least in theory. The Austrians have held on to Hayek's position on the "informational" role of prices and the incentives problem.

btw, i think a more formal definition of scarcity that's worth revisiting regards excludability, rivalry and transparency in public goods theory. j. bradford delong [1] and a. michael froomkin [2] wrote an excellent paper on the technical conditions for efficient market exchange in relation to informational 'goods' and intellectual 'property' about this.

also, bernard lietaer [3] and keith hart [4] make a great case that money (which is basically an agreement) is itself a scarce resource that could be alleviated by the creation of "agreement" systems, like LETS and HOURs, (other than central bank administered fiat currencies) which i think would be a more sophisticated way of implementing social wages.