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Slider comments on Why capitalism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If there were even more thirstier money holder I would not get the cup at $2. The coffee shops valuation of the coffee is entirely dependent on the sell value of the good and not because the owner wants to drink the coffee.
The tangent is about how only inefficient economies have traders (people that make money by not creating property but receiving and releasing property). If the coffee house employs workers or buys coffee beans there is an element of functioning as a trader. That is the coffee house asks more from the customer than it thinks the components of the coffee are worth.
There is additionally the issue that the exchangers don't need to benefit in similar scales. The coffee can be near parity for the thirsty customer while the trade value for the coffee house can be substantial. Because the coffee house and the customer partly use money to buy goods from shared pools of products by buying the customer hurts his buying power.
Only if you consider the absence of costless, automatic, instant teleportation of goods from where they are made to where they are wanted an inefficiency. If that is inefficiency, there is no such thing as an efficient economy.
You might as well go further and consider the absence of instant creation of goods from thin air an inefficiency. Indeed, is there anything one spends effort on, that the existence of that effort could not be judged an inefficiency?
There is no such thing as what the components of the coffee "are worth". The growers grow coffee, the distributors transport it, the baristas turn it into cups of coffee, and the owner of the coffee house provides the premises and equipment. The customer pays all of them for providing a cup of coffee at the place and time he wants it. The "intrinsic worth" of coffee plays no part in any of this.