When it comes to production, capitalism and socialism are often presented as constituting extremes of a spectrum of economic organization, where control over the means of production is either entirely in the hands of profit-seeking private owners (the capitalists) at one extreme or in the hands central planners (supposedly acting for the benefit of society according to socialists) at the other extreme. Framing the question with such terminology implicitly smears capitalists as profiting at the expense of society; a sordid linguistic trick that pretends that coercive centralization is more