> It has received fulsome praise from such right-libertarian eminences as economists Milton Friedman and Donald Boudreaux

I had Boudreaux for an economics class in law school. His, shall we say, enthusiasm and dogmatic faith in markets was off putting. I once got riled up and sparred with him a little in class when we were on the subject of monopolies and he was teaching the theory that monopoly profits are an impossibility. My point was that the theory only makes sense when transaction costs are zero; non-zero transaction costs means monopolies can extract excess profits when there's an asymmetry in transaction (particularly financing) costs that favor the monopolist, as there often will be.

But later I realized that, at the end of the day, and like most of abstract economics, the theory was more right than wrong, just incomplete and oversimplified. And I learned much that day. If I had rejected the theory outright and walked way (notwithstanding remembering how to recite it for the exam), I would have ended up in a much worse place intellectually than accepting it, with qualifications, as an important conceptual model. The mature takeaway from his teaching the theory isn't that monopolies can't exist, just that it's more difficult than you'd think, and monopolists' ability to extract profits are bounded by the degree to which the situation deviates from the simplified model world. And doing so puts us in a place where can we can constructively ask and answer quantitative questions, as opposed to debating in qualitative rhetorical terms.

It's childish to nit-pick ideas and then pretend one has vanquished them because they pointed out technicalities about how they're wrong. The point of "I, Pencil" is to teach how humans communicate, cooperate, and produce amazing things through systems and processes that keep them all at arms length, without everyone deliberately working toward the same targeted outcome. Pedagologically, it does teach something profound and non-obvious. Is the essay simplified and reductive? Of course, but no more reductive (and IMO considerably less so) than, e.g., the anti-colonialist rhetoric trotted out in "Revisited", which feels more like an extended ad hominem than a substantive piece about political economics. (And it's worth pointing out that economic thinking can be useful in understanding and addressing colonial exploitation, such as understanding it in terms of cost externalization. And unlike rhetorical moralizing, that approach suggests far more actionable options for systematically ameliorating such exploitation--i.e. how to put our money where our mouth is, literally and figuratively.)