> The whole story is nothing more than an attack on an implied strawman.

I think when it came out, the world was a very different place. A large chunk of the world lived in command economies (USSR, China, etc...), and even in the west, where WWII and the massive government involvement in the economy was a very recent memory, the notion that someone could just calculate all the pieces better than the market probably wasn't quite so foreign as it seems today.