Agree with others, this is an awesome thought experiment.

I have to go to the mines, but I really like how you've stepped back to a meta-perspective that is rarely explored: what are the un-surfaced assumptions under which we consider "free" markets [1] to be optimal in coordinating under scarcity? Or maybe the inverse: what assumptions underlie the belief, often unexamined, that other forms of collective action are bad?

It's not hard to construct a scenario, like a space station; or a nuclear submarine, or London under siege, where free exchange by free individuals is not the optimal policy for most intuitive definitions of 'optimal.'

[1] Scare quotes because what "free" even means in practice is widely misunderstood. See e.g., this book.