Scarcity challenged

Just finished a book "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. I read it with mixed feelings.

See, the whole reason for my pseudonym is my firm belief in the market mechanism to solve allocation problems via the communication of a price (with a spice of game theory and externalities) and Tim has put it so elegantly and concisely in his book. It is exactly how I would have liked to put it and how I have been arguing the issue over the years. Read the book, not my blogs!

I see this mechanism as one of the most fundamental laws of nature, well demonstrated in traditionally non-economical fields as biology and evolution as well as in information theory. The world revolves around creating scarcity and fighting scarcity. All seemingly other conflicts are just dressed up differently.