Wanna see something funny? Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy has a great post about the Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle which has had a long argument about the ethics of collectivist Lego. 
Yes. You heard that right. Collectivist Lego.
Here are a few choice quotes from the article the teachers at the school have written:
After nearly two months of observing the children's Legotown construction, we decided to ban the Legos.
The Lego trading game presented core issues that would be our focus for the months to come. Our analysis of the game, as teachers, guided our planning for the rest of the investigation into the issues of power, privilege, and authority that spanned the rest of the year.
After five months of naming and investigating the issues of power, rules, ownership, and authority, we were ready to reconstruct Legotown in a new way.
With these three agreements - which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources - we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.
According to their website, it currently costs between $910 and $1185 a month to send one's child to the Hilltop school. Perhaps if they truly valued social justice and equality, they could spend less time worrying about Marxist analysis of the economics of Lego brick distribution and spend it on, oh, just about anything else that actually improves the intelligence of the students or opening up the opportunity for other kids to get a pre-school education.
The fact that you have people who are - by their own admission - spending months on said economics of Lego brick distribution may be - for the more doomsday-sayers among us - a pretty good example of the sort of rampant insanity that one should take as a good sign of the rapidly approaching end.
On a slightly more serious point, the idea of capitalism described in the above linked article is utterly facile because it fails to take in to account innovation as a source of value. If you don't see that money can be used to invest in things which create value for others, one doesn't understand capitalism. To put it simply, if I have a ten pound note I can do a number of things with it - I could spend it on a lot of chocolate bars and eat them. This would make me happy. I could also spend the money on buying some art materials and draw a pretty picture which may make both myself and others happy.
The question is simple: does having a central planner design what one is going to use the Lego bricks for create more innovation than letting individuals decide for themselves? The example of the personal computer says 'no'. The example of the sort of cars that were churned out by the old Soviet bloc also says 'no'. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps architecture by committee really is the future. Perhaps the identikit houses I see next to the railway station really are great pieces of architecture. Perhaps (the author grits his teeth) Prince Charles is right. I have a funny feeling that I'm right though, and that the only way to have great things is in a free society.
I do wonder how the Hilltop school would feel about social justice if the parent's of the Lego kids decided to pull them out of school. 
