When progressives demand free food for everyone..

This meme/twitter exchange really drives home the point that people, especially but not exclusively on the left, think you can separate production and distribution. That is, they believe that the method by which resources are distributed/allocated has nothing to do with how many of those resources we have in the first place.

The market system of property, prices, and profits is far from perfect, but its enormous advantage is that when goods are allocated using them, people have the knowledge and incentives necessary to produce more of the goods in question.

One problem both arguments share is that, economically speaking, the categories "food" and "health care" are not something we buy as such. We buy specific foods and specific health care goods and services. If someone wants to argue "food" and "health care" should be free (or at least not determined by profits), they are going to have to explain how they will know exactly what kinds of food and health care to produce, and, more so, what inputs to use to produce it.

"But we know how to grow food - we don't need capitalism for that."

Wrong. We do. We do know how to grow food, but what we don't know without the prices and profits of capitalism is what sorts of food that people want grown and what are the best inputs to use to grow it. We might know how to grow things, but we would have no idea how to feed 7.5 billion people if it weren't for private property, exchange, prices, and profits, and an ethical system that tolerates, if not praises, exchange and profit-seeking.

So we actually do need capitalism to feed the world. If it weren't for capitalism, we never would know all that we do know about how to feed the world.