I’ve been reading some Hayek lately and one insight significantly altered my perspective on economics. When he discusses the division of knowledge, he states that the situation in a free country is not of an economy, but of the mutual coordination of millions of individual economies.
It is incorrect to compare a socialist economy to a free market economy. There is no free market economy, there is a free market between economies. It is the fact that all individual economies are cooperating with each other through markets that allow them to organize a complex production structure. A socialist economy only has one economy, even though it may try to clear prices for final goods.