Good stuff, both in terms of the gutpunch writing, and the insight about emergent phenomena. One of the basic intellectual differences between liberals and conservatives has been called the "scope of causality" by George Lakoff, and refers to the degree of abstraction one can handle in determining cause-and-effect. The idea that a social phenomenon can just happen seems perfectly reasonable to us Liberals, but it's scary voodoo to the granite-bound conservative mind. Conservatives gravitate to conspiracy theories because each link in the chain of conspiracy theory is reassuringly solid and comprehensible. In a good conspiracy theory, though the subject is ostensibly the shadows, everything is perfectly clear and understandable to the theorist and the trail never disappears into the underbrush even for a moment.

I think it's a bit over the top to state flatly that the source of all wealth is human labor. It seems ironic that when Marx first put forth that flat statement it was less true than it is today. In the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was new, business leaders tended also to be the entrepreneurs whose good ideas or organizational skill founded the company, and so an honest accounting had to credit the "capitalist" at the head of the business with contributing a good deal of labor himself, albeit much of it mental. But today the world's become hyperspecialized, and professional managers, MBAs, are the capitalists, and they're a distinctly different class of people from the thinkers and tinkerers they've displaced.

Now the creative people work for the capitalists, and the capitalists congratulate themselves for having finally put dangerously creative places like Silicon Valley on a businesslike footing. You can't predict the next brilliant idea, and it might bite you in the ass; but you can cut mediocrity off the roll by the yard, and reliability counts for everything in business.