Those “chains” are a brace holding up the world.
That’s my adaptation of the infamous quote from The Communist Manifesto: You have nothing to lose but your chains! (or the actual translation: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”)
A strong summary by weak AI:
The global supply chain is the most complex, voluntary, peaceable system of human cooperation ever (largely) undevised. No central planner ordered it into existence. Millions of individuals, pursuing their own ends, wove together a miraculous network that threads Indonesian rubber in your shoes and Chilean copper in your phone. That’s what price signals can do, undistorted. בן זומא ראה אוכלוסא על גב מעלה בהר הבית אמר ברוך חכם הרזים וברוך שברא כל אלו לשמשני.
Socialism doesn’t liberate this system. It destroys it. Less workers, less effective, worse social conditions. And history is unambiguous about the darkness that returns when market order collapses: not brotherhood, but scarcity. Not justice, but painful death.