“I, Egg”, or, how many millions of people have to cooperate for you to boil one egg?

Check out Exxon-Mobil’s commercial. Try to take a completely wild guess how many people are involved in getting one egg to your house and the number of people and millions of dollars of investment to get a bit of natural gas to the stove:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PmD8B64vSM8]

(Cross-post from my other blog, Outrun Change.)

Hat tip: I, Egg, at Cafe Hayek. Prof Boudreaux points out:

These marvels are nearly all the product of unplanned human cooperation that spans the globe and involves the creativity and efforts of literally hundreds of millions of people.  A distinguishing feature of this marvelous market-created world of ours is that not only do you not know how to make any of the individual goods and services that you consume, but no one knows how to make any of these things.

Those millions of people don’t really care about you. They are just making a living based on what the market immediately around them demands. It just all comes together giving you natural gas and eggs whenever you want it.

Very, very cool.