Most of us take the products we use everyday for granted. We never give a moment's thought to how they came to be or how many people were involved in their production. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has taken a story by Leonard Read about the simple lead pencil and turned it into an excellent video illustrating how complex and intricate free markets are.
They're like ecosystems, and, like ecosystems, they're vulnerable to human interference, particularly to interference by a government which thinks it can somehow control some aspect of the process without disrupting the whole system.
Thanks to Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air for posting the video.