The flip side of 'I, Pencil'

August 28, 2023 By John F. Di Leo

In December, 1958, economist Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, published a short essay in FEE’s periodical, The Freeman.........“I, Pencil” was conceived as a fanciful anthropomorphism, the genealogy of that most common of household tools, the lead pencil.  In those few pages, Leonard Read demonstrated the magic woven by the Invisible Hand of the free market.  In the generations since, millions of us have learned to respect how countless different industries, countless people, all over the world, unknowingly come together to contribute the necessary components to make it possible for someone to manufacture a pencil (or in fact, any other product).

These farmers, chemical companies, lumber mills, miners, and metalworkers do their daily jobs, often unaware that somewhere, half a world away, someone will be using their paint, their graphite, their wood, their metal, their rubber, to manufacture the millions of pencils we all depend on for school, work, crafts and art.  It’s an amazing story, brilliantly told. It’s likely that every reader of this publication could recite some lines from it by heart; it’s that familiar to the modern conservative mind................The message is one of education and optimism. We don’t need five-year-plans like the communists dream up abroad; we don’t need a national industrial plan like American Democrats propose here at home.  There will always be pencils because the free market enables it to happen.  Isn’t it glorious?............

The primary lesson of “I, Pencil” was that we don’t need a government to mandate the manufacture of a pencil, because the market will provide it without such a mandate.  The public demand – the choice of the consumer – is an infinitely more effective mandate.

But there is secondary lesson, buried just beneath the surface: Government must not meddle with all those contributing industries.  The magic of the Invisible Hand depends upon the government behaving itself.  It depends on the government leaving well enough alone.............To Read More....