I think that’s a bad definition of value. Is child labor valuable? No. No amount of coal or whatever is ever going to make up for the horror of living in a society that could treat its children that way. Even in purely utilitarian terms, child labor is just not valuable. There’s an externality to cruelty that has to be factored in.

If capitalism funnels resources towards band-aids instead of cures (and I get that you might not buy that point yet), then it’s not “dedicating Agency towards problems that generate the most Value.” It is overwhelmingly more valuable for society if diabetes is cured. Imagine all the diabetics currently chained to their dead-end jobs because they can’t afford private insurance getting to start their own businesses and compete.

The problem I have with this argument overall is the extreme flattening of everything into binaries. If you get the capital, you’re Europe. Otherwise, you’re Venezuela. It just doesn’t fit with how these achievements actually get done. Like somebody had to pay for government-subsidized education. And we are ALL richer for it. Every single one of us is better off for having a better informed electorate. Competition is better now that the poor have the education to compete with the rich. There are amazing benefits to public health when everybody has to take chemistry or biology or whatever.

Did we have to SOLVE SCARCITY to outlaw child labor or get public education? No, this “we’ll get around to it later when capitalism fixes everything” rhetoric is just too convenient. It fails to interrogate whether capitalism is actually fixing those things and overlooks the grey areas in between where we can make marginal progress.