Friedman's example is more an illustration that when we want to design a replacement for a working system, there is often a lot more complexity than expected -

Friedman's example is more an illustration that when we want to design a replacement for a working system, there is often a lot more complexity than expected - reinvented wheels are often square. Your example ends up with a piece of charcoal that doesn't have an eraser, gives you slivers, gets charcoal all over, has to be burnt every time you need to sharpen it (with a market-produced lighter or matches), doesn't work with pencil sharpeners, and smells like smoke instead of that "freshly sharpened pencil" smell (yeah, that's a thing). Your re-invented wheel is square. Yes, Friedman wants us to examine how the market works - because it works better for these complex coordinations than any other system we've devised. The market has facilitated the discovery and communication of the user requirements, and the price mechanism has coordinated the work of all the producers/transporters/exchangers of all the raw ingredients and intermediate products as well as the final product, and has enabled an ecosystem that produces compatible pencil sharpeners, grips, etc. And did anyone ever think Java EE was the only way? That was much more an example of a designed system to replace the messy evolved world of CGI/Perl/PHP.