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The "invisible hand" [of the market] works well in these conditions:
- a commodity with a large number of sellers and buyers
- (relatively) low barriers of entry
- all information about the commodity is freely and equally available to everyone
- consistent rules of fairness, binding agreements, and lack of fraud are well enforced
When you have corruption, or a relatively small number of dominant players, or vastly unequal information among buyers and sellers, or a variety of other things that upset the above formula, the invisible hand's power grows weaker and weaker, and other effects take over.
It's not that the invisible hand doesn't work or doesn't exist, it's that it doesn't apply to everything, and too many people are under a near-religious belief that we should pretend it does.
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b) I have no idea what the 'invisible hand' is/is about, and without that info, this doesn't stand alone very well.
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(b) The invisible hand is an anthropomorphic (or at least intent-ascribing) metaphor for the tendency of economic forces to seek some sort of equilibrium. I've been hearing the phrase tossed around sans footnotes, or at most clarified with "Adam Smith's invisible hand", since I was in high school, so it didn't occur to me that it wasn't a nearly-universal meme in English. Hmm. Maybe I should add a footnote pointing to this comment ... (Also, thanks for pointing out that problem as well.)