Murphy on prices

 But that's only because normally, a market economy "spontaneously" solves this tremendous coordination problem through prices and the corresponding signals of profit and loss. If someone had to centrally plan an entire economy from scratch, there would be all sorts of bottlenecks and waste — as the actual experience of socialism has shown.

Murphy is talking about commerce arranging machines to produce over a distributed economy.
Businessmen do not use price for coordination, they use queue length and inventory build up. We notice shortages first and raise prices second.  A good example is OPEC,  where oil producers meet and examine soil stocks around the world to determine how whether production should increase or decrease, then they set a target price.   Factories update equipment based on their improved flow and relative similarity to the previous generation of equipment, then they look at price.

Items are priced to partition the market.  he middle class car buyer skips the Mercedes show room every time, never bothering to look  If Mercedes wants to sell the middle class car it cannot do so without heavy advertising.

Murpjy says this, which is true:

Without the guidance of market prices, we wouldn't observe a smoothly functioning economy,

But he misses a point of coordination. Prices cannot do their smoothing operation absent some concept of production chains. A reductio absurdum argument here would have the buyer of a particular good looking at the price of all goods, selecting the prices he accepts, then checking to see if it is the good he wants.

This distinction between the use of production knowledge vs price knowledge explains the asymmetry of the economy. We set prices after we solve the coordination problem. A coordination problem occurs when goods become short, then all prices crash in the chain until we reestablish coordination.