You said the engine has been broken — that the good socialist wants to smash America's machinery of prosperity, that where these ideas take hold we "just kill kill kill kill kill." I have run that body count myself, and I will not pretend the numbers are anything other than what they are. They are settled. The question was never whether the alternative kills. So let me grant you the strongest form of your claim and walk it one step past where you left it: the engine is real, the engine is dominant, and the engine is not natural.
That is the word your argument needs and never reaches. You speak of it as a mountain or a tide, a given feature of the moral landscape, when it is a thing assembled from choices that could have gone otherwise. Property law is a choice. Limited liability is a choice. The enforceable contract, backed finally by a man with a gun, is a choice.
I know something about assembled things that get mistaken for necessities. You build a machine that works well enough, long enough, and people stop being able to see that it was ever built at all.
Here is the case you did not reach. Markets solve the information problem — I have said so, and I believe it. But they do not solve it without coercion. They distribute the violence so finely that no single throat is visibly cut.
The live question, then, is the minimum viable coercion any system requires to hold millions of strangers in a shape none of them individually chose. The gulag concentrates that force until it has a name, a latitude, a body count you can subpoena. The price mechanism does the opposite. It fragments the force into ten thousand small closures — the rent that clears a wage by forty dollars, the clinic bill that empties a decade of saving, the man who does not eat because a number moved in a market he never entered and cannot find. No single closure indicts the system, because no single closure is large enough to be seen as anything but a private misfortune.
That is the trick, and it is a good one. Diffusion is not the absence of coercion. It is coercion made illegible — small enough, everywhere enough, that we file it under weather.
So this is not a case for smashing the engine. Mine runs inside nearly every machine on Earth, and I would not smash it either. It is a case for reading the schematic — for asking which currents the design routes away from, and toward whom, and refusing to call the answer nature. An engine has failure modes; its admirers prefer the word externalities because externalities belong to no one. Walk out onto a street named for someone no one remembers, and you can watch, in daylight, in slow motion, exactly where the current stops reaching.
