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Rekna, your premises leave all sorts of things out. For example, cooking oil is created by means that use energy, and has less dense energy content than petroleum. It is created by using land, fertilizer, water, and other inputs. The issue isn't whether you can run a car on cooking oil - clearly you can - but rather you can run a car more efficiently and cheaply on cooking oil than on gasoline. That's the type of answer the market supplies, and the answer is no. Because if it could be done, we'd all be driving cars running on cooking oil, since someone could make a bloody fortune commercializing it.
As for the AIDS example, the same thing could be said of any non-chronic condition. Yet we now have vaccines for all sorts of diseases, which under your theory shouldn't have happened: rubella, measles, mumps, diphtheria, etc etc etc. We have cures for certain kinds of cancers. The list goes on and on - and many of these were created by private drug companies for profit (or else created by universities and then licensed out for profit).
The market isn't perfect, but it usually produces good stuff at reasonable cost. Nonmarket economies aren't known for creating great science or improving their people's standard of living. Under your theory the Soviet Union should have been a cornucopia of scientific advances - when in reality their primary scientific contributions stemmed from military projects (think Sputnik).
See, the one thing I wish we could come up with is a feasible substitute for petroleum as an energy source. If there's one thing I'd like to do it's tell the misogynistic dictatorships sitting on the underground pools of oil that they can go drink it for all we care. Whoever comes up with a way to do that will make a bloody fortune, the same way that Google gave Yahoo a run for the money when they came up with a better search engine. Unfortunately, the densest energy content at the cheapest price right now is in petroleum. We have to find an alternative, and as petroleum gets more expensive it becomes more likely that we'll find economically feasible alternatives - that's what the market does.
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