I’ve been meaning to direct readers to a breezy essay by Robert Tracinski, who pivots off a hippyish homemade poster to reinvent capitalism:

But let’s not pick this apart. Let’s take the idea seriously. Hey, what if we all became small farmers and traded with each other? As they say on the Internet: you’ll never guess what happened next.

Maybe instead of everybody growing the same things, we could all produce what we’re best at and trade with others for what we need. We could come up with a catchy name for this, like “division of labor.” And we would need somewhere to exchange these goods with each other, which we could call a “market.”

Maybe we could get even more specialized. Some people could devote themselves just to growing young plants in greenhouses in the spring for others to plant when the weather gets warmer. Or they could provide seeds for other people to use, or breed hybrids with better yields or other desirable characteristics.

And on the thought experiment goes, through the process of regionalizing products and introducing an external medium of trade, money, that allows both trade over long distances and easy distribution across multiple goods (allowing the trade of one cow, for example, to be used for corn, cider, and construction materials, for example), as well as the saving and storage of wealth for “trades” across time.

You know, it really is a marvel of brainwashing and propaganda that progressives have managed to keep so much common sense at bay for so long.  On the other hand, it’s not difficult to understand how consolidating wealth and power under the control of a political elite leads to inequity even as it’s sold as a route to fairness.