This review of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress somehow manages to completely omit the fact that Luna is a prison colony from which even the freeborn cannot escape

This review of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress somehow manages to completely omit the fact that Luna is a prison colony from which even the freeborn cannot escape due to being adapted to ⅙G. Furthermore, the Lunar Penal Authority sets prices not just for food, but for water, fertilizer, and energy as well. The alternative to revolt is a Malthusian crisis on Luna itself, leading to food riots and cannibalism in short order (as projected by the story's AGI, Mycroft). Furthermore, the aimed for anarcho-libertarian/minarchist utopia FAILS in its aims, and the main protagonist is left musing about emigrating for somewhere less crowded in the outer system. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to criticise about the novel, but if you're going to pit yourself against the economic setup and the author's resolution of the crisis he set-up, you'd do well to address the actual novel, rather than a fun house version of it. On top of everything else, it is worth considering the political economy context within which Heinlein was living and writing. Only a few years later, a Republican president instituted wage and price controls in an attempt to curb inflation, and de-pegged the US dollar from the gold standard. This, after railing for years that such measures were socialist schemes. And yet soon enough setting the exact price of milk was a matter of policy debates and political horse-trading in the Oval Office. In 1966, the political and economic environment was far more amenable to the notion of a command-and-control economy (and in fact, we see such regimes instituted today in miniature within privately-run for-profit prisons). Heinlein's setting of a for-profit lunar Botany Bay with a captive population being squeezed to death isn't at all a huge stretch of the imagination, nor indefensible as if a mere strawman, in that context.