A market capitalist system requires scarcity in order to function. There must be have-nots in order for it to work for the haves. For this reason, where scarcity does not exist, it will *create scarcity*. This is currently visible in the market for food in the US.

Over 30% of the food in the US goes to waste. That number is more than double the rate of food insecurity in the US. This is often phrased as our having a "distribution problem" rather than a production problem.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-food-system-factsheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Food_Insecurity.png

However, what that discourse misses is that we don't have any distribution at all. We have a market. Markets don't distribute goods, they set prices. If a hungry person is less capable or willing to pay a higher price for the food, it will simply go to someone who is.

Moreover, if the hungry-price is less than the cost of destruction by the producer, the producer will simply destroy the excess rather than take a loss on its distribution.

"Fixing" this implies that it's not working right, but it is working right. We have decided that all of our interventions into the food market will work to shore up that market rather than bypass it. We attempt to inject money so that the hungry can pay more.

But a market in a capitalist system doesn't work without scarcity. It is better for the producer for their good to be more scarce than it needs to be. As long as that's true, scarcity will always exist. The market requires it to function and will create it.

Diamonds are extremely common. Creating a copy of a song or a book now costs essentially nothing. Food is abundant. But we have, as a society, decided that everything is a market, and thus everything must be scarce. Nothing may exist in enough numbers to meet demand.

Even a heavily regulated market is still a market and will still create scarcity. Even if you add something alongside it to better distribute goods, the market will create incentives for the destruction of that program.

Markets work very well for luxury goods, but when they are used for necessities--food, healthcare, water, even non-polluted air--they guarantee that someone will not have enough of these things. They *require* that to be the case, or the market collapses.