Yup. The conventional wisdom is that there’s economic goods and “extra-economic” goods. But that is not the case, everything we want has to be produced expending scarce resources that have alternative uses.
What I meant by allocation mechanism wan’t the entire economic system, but particular pricing signals. As in “this loaf of bread costs two Dollars”. Socialists think that we can make physical goods less scarce by changing what the pricing signal says. If we declare that bread should cost one Dollar then two people can afford one. The extra bread apparently appears out of thin air. For example, many people still believe that if we make health care free somehow it would be abundant enough for everyone to get it. So now there’s not enough cancer treatments for everyone (which is why they are priced at a point where a portion of those who want them can’t afford them), now we declared that they should be free, and now there are enough cancer treatments for everyone? Where do these additional resources come from? People believe “money causes us to not be able to pay for stuff, thus if you take away the need to pay for stuff it will appear out of thin air”. I call these ‘free lunch theories’.
Communism/The Venus Project is the hardcore version of this, featuring the belief that we can create superabundance by just abolishing money altogether. Most modern socialists believe in a more mitigated version that’s just about a few industries, which makes it easier to disguise the ‘free lunch fallacy’. All of demand-side economics commits this fallacy.
Supply-side economics is the specific rejection of the free lunch notion, we are saying that there is no way to trick the economy into releasing free resources by tinkering with market signals, you actually have to produce stuff to get it. We are proposing a particular economic system, but one that leaves market allocation alone.
Oh, and if you want a response to that resource thread, I can do one. I kinda wrote a response but then forgot about it.