I, Pencil (1958)
&gt; Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants.<p>If everybody is working in this process, then where do the people who expropriate the most from this process - the idle class heirs - get their profits?<p>&gt; There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.<p>The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted.  Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that <i>blocked</i> free trade, not facilitated it.  L. Read is using the metaphor in the exact opposite manner in which it was proposed.<p>Also, much of this could be said about a pencil being made in the USSR.  Did any one person in the Soviet Union know how to make an entire pencil, from tree to graphite and such?  Perhaps some government bureaucrat looked at his charts and ordered it to be made, but how different is that than the corporate bureaucrat looking at his charts and ordering pencils to be made?<p>Also, in our era of TARP bank bailouts, quantitative easing, farm subsidies and such, this notion of say the US government not having a central role in the economy as it exists is absurd.  This medium we read and type on now was created through military contracts to Fairchild Semiconductor, DARPA grants for ARPAnet research and such, over many decades.