Markets are just really good information-processing machines

Wheelan's opening claim is that a market economy's real genius isn't that it rewards greed — it's that it solves an information problem no central planner could ever solve manually: coordinating what millions of people want to buy with what millions of businesses should produce, using nothing but prices as the signal.

His illustration is the humble price of a used car, a haircut, or a bushel of wheat — a single number that compresses an almost unimaginable amount of scattered information (supply conditions, consumer tastes, substitute goods, weather, expectations about the future) into a form any buyer or seller can act on instantly, without needing to understand any of the underlying causes.

This is why centrally planned economies historically struggled to match market economies at matching supply with demand: no bureaucracy, however well-intentioned, can gather and process information as fast or as cheaply as a decentralized price system does automatically. Prices aren't just costs — they're compressed information.