You are describing individual workers in a planned economy, but a market description applies from the point of view of the planner as well: goods still have rates of substitution and thus cost in every way that matters, regardless of whether you choose to measure it in dollars or kilograms of wheat; closing your eyes and pretending they don’t is only going to make your plan less efficient. In fact, when Kantorovich tried to figure out how to make one more efficient (resulting in both a Stalin Prize and a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, but no shifts in the Soviet bureaucracy), the free parameters of his model ended up being prices even if no pieces of paper with signatures of bankers were changing hands.
Which is not to say a market is a good thing in any specific implementation. What it is, in this degree of generality, is inevitable. That a (more or less) free exchange of tokens of value is a good way to achieve the optimum is an additional assumption that needs separate justification, but seems to be plausible so far, or at least lacking in shattering disproof. Still, there is a hell of a lot of distance between these and any particular Western country in the year of our Lord 2021. Going from being dissatisfied with the latter to rejecting the former is like immediately blaming the compiler when your home-grown TLS implementation gets hacked. I mean, compilers bugs do exist, but that giant ASN.1 serializer looks mighty suspicious. (Tax code, antitrust enforcement, employees’ rights, need I continue?)
I think your argument actually also touches on something that I see as a fault in recent Western socialist or socialist-aligned movements, which is that market forces and capitalism are often improperly separated. There is often a large focus on how the market is evil, even when it's discussed in a language that decries them as problems of capitalism; for example, people might blame problems such as high rents on capitalism, and then imagine that nationalizing real estate companies will fix it, which it of course most likely won't. So, kind of coming at this from the other side, I do agree that a clear separation is necessary when talking about capitalism vs socialism on the one hand, and market economies vs planned economies on the other hand. But then you have to explain: what is the difference between a market economy and a planned economy, in an age where economic planning in China takes prices and market forces into account, while in the West, a company like Amazon, operating within the market, is so large that it has to do demand planning akin to the Soviet bureaucracy, lest they over- or under-order produce? Which of these societies is truly "more market"?
I think that the market can indeed be a very valuable system to reduce all kinds of inefficiencies. But at the same time, changes in tax code or antitrust enforcement will not alter capitalism's natural tendency toward monopolization, which ultimately turns everything into a planned economy anyhow. So in my opinion, the question is about how to effectively use the positive effects of the market, while also avoiding the less-positive effects that private enterprise has on society at large. And it seems to me like Kantorovich may have been closer to finding an answer than HFT yuppies at wall street will ever be.
Which is not to say a market is a good thing in any specific implementation. What it is, in this degree of generality, is inevitable. That a (more or less) free exchange of tokens of value is a good way to achieve the optimum is an additional assumption that needs separate justification, but seems to be plausible so far, or at least lacking in shattering disproof. Still, there is a hell of a lot of distance between these and any particular Western country in the year of our Lord 2021. Going from being dissatisfied with the latter to rejecting the former is like immediately blaming the compiler when your home-grown TLS implementation gets hacked. I mean, compilers bugs do exist, but that giant ASN.1 serializer looks mighty suspicious. (Tax code, antitrust enforcement, employees’ rights, need I continue?)