Nobody Knows How To Make A Pencil
(Adapted from I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read. Hat tip to Ginny.)
Every schoolchild has one. There’s probably one in your desk. The yellow pencil is an exercise in simplicity. Two sticks of wood, glued together with a stick of lead in the center and a rubber eraser at the end.
But is it that simple? How is a pencil made? Who, by himself, could make that pencil? The simple answer is: no one! There is no single person in the world who knows enough to make the simple pencil.
How can that be? Let’s look at what it takes to make that pencil.
The wood from which it is made came from a cedar tree cut down in the forests of Oregon or Northern California. Now, think that to cut down that tree, it took saws and ropes and trucks and all manner of other gear. To make the saws and trucks and gear, it took steel. To make that steel, it took iron ore.
The knowledge and expertise of literally thousands of people was required at this point just to be able to harvest the wood. But there’s more.
The black center of the pencil, which we call ‘lead’ is actually made from compressed graphite. Graphite comes from mines in Ceylon and is mixed with clay from Mississippi along with other acids and animal fats. The mixture is processed several times until it comes out of a sausage grinder-like machine in the shape that we know it. At that point it’s baked at 1,850 degrees to cure.
What one person would know how to mine the graphite and find the clay and construct the oven required to make the pencil’s lead?
The eraser, which contains but is not made from rubber, is produced by reacting rapeseed oil from Indonesia with sulfur chloride. Pumice from Italy is mixed with the rubber to give the eraser its grit.
No one person knows how to make the eraser, but instead relies on the skills of Indonesians and Italians.
The brass fairings that hold the eraser probably came from the midwestern United States, where a computerized machine stamps, rolls, finishes and conveys them. But the brass’s zinc was probably mined in the U.S. or India and its copper was probably mined in Chile or Peru.
The yellow paint, the glue that holds the wood together… literally tens of thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.
People who don’t speak the same language. Who practice different religions. Who might hate one another if they ever met. When you visit a store and buy this pencil, you are — in effect — trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of time from all those thousands of people.
What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil?
There was no “Pencil Czar” sending out orders from Washington. It was the magic of the free market. The impersonal operation of a market system that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil, so that you could have it for a few pennies.
The illustration of how a simple pencil is made highlights the fallacies of planned or heavily regulated economies. How could any bureaucrat, or a building of them, could do a better job than the free market? This is why other planned economies like the former Soviet Union failed.
The free-market system is so very important to our society. It fosters harmony, cooperation and peaceful interactions between the peoples of the world. The more we can prevent forces from reining in the free market, the more we all benefit from lower costs and more bounty and diversity of products and services that enhance our lives.
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"We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie."
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs
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