[CaptainSwing]

beautiful text but, as with others, I take issue with the conclusion.

What about the internal hierarchies of the firms involved? Who was freer, the owner of the pencil factory or the men in Sri-Lanka working for pennies to mine the graphite?

And the crass juxtpositioning of 'central planning' and the 'free market' is lazy and disingenuous. I'm no celebrant of the USSR but they weren't incapable of abstraction in their central planning,a s this seems to suggest. They werecapable of coordinating the production of pencils without Stalin knowing every process involved (just as mail functions without one man who knows each of the streets in America)

It's far from a perfect comparison, but I'm reminded of this classic Brecht poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-worker-reads-history/