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Imprimis, On Line -- June 1992
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free monthly
publication of Hillsdale College (circulation 375,000
worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts institution
known for its defense of free market principles and Western
culture and its nearly 150-year refusal to accept federal
funds. Imprimis publishes lectures by such well-known
figures as Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe,
Charlton Heston, and many more. Permission to reprint is
hereby granted, provided credit is given to Hillsdale
College. Copyright 1992. For more information on free print
subscriptions or back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-
439-1524, ext. 2319.
------------------------------
"I, Pencil"
by Leonard E. Read, Founder,
Foundation for Economic Education
------------------------------
Volume 21, Number 6
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
June 1992
------------------------------
Preview: Nearly 10 years ago Imprimis featured a
reprint of a 1958 essay called, simply, "I Pencil." We
continue to believe that it is one of the finest defenses of
the free market ever written and have reprinted it again
here.
It is an essay that invites wonder. Wonder at the
countless bits of human knowledge and raw materials
spontaneously organized by our global market economy in the
making of an ordinary wooden pencil. Wonder at what one
individual can achieve for millions of his fellow men
through a lifetime of dedication to principle. And wonder,
most of all, at the everyday miracles made possible by a
political and economic system that dares to have faith in
free men.
------------------------------
I am a lead pencil--the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to
all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. (My
official name is "Mongol 482." My many ingredients are
assembled, fabricated and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil
Company, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.)
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's
all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to
begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a
mystery--more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of
lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who
use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background.
This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the
commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in
which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, as
a wise man, G. K. Chesterton, observed, "We are perishing
for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your
wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact,
if you can understand me--no, that's too much to ask of
anyone--if you can become aware of the miraculousness that I
symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so
unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I
can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an
airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because--well, because I
am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this
earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't
it? Especially when you realize that there are about one and
one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much
meets the eye--there's some wood, lacquer, the printed
labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Innumerable Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so
is it impossible for me to name and explain all my
antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to
impress upon you the richness and complexity of my
background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a
cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California
and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope
and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting
the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the
persons and the numberless skills that went into their
fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its
refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and
bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope;
the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the
cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold
thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the
loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro,
California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat
cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and
install the communication systems incidental thereto? These
legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs
are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth
of an inch in thickness. These are kiln-dried and then
tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The
slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went
into the making of the tint and kilns, into supplying the
heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the
other things a mill requires? Are sweepers in the mill among
my ancestors? Yes, and also included are the men who poured
the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company
hydroplant which supplies the mill's power. And don't
overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand
in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation
from California to Wilkes-Barre.
Complicated Machinery
Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and
building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving
parents of mine--each slat is given eight grooves by a
complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in
every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat
atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are
mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
My "lead" itself--it contains no lead at all--is
complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider the
miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of
the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those
who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put
them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the
lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and
the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in
which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process.
Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow--
animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After
passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally
appears as endless extrusions--as from a sausage grinder--
cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850
degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and
smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture
which includes candililla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax and
hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all
of the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the
growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a
part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the
lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of
more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying
heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make
resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. Think of all
the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the
skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of
nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel.
What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete
story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on
it would take pages to explain.
Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to
in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the
errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is
what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by
reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with
sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is
only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous
vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from
Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is
cadmium sulfide.
Vast Web of Know-How
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no
single person on the face of this earth knows how to make
me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in
my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few
of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in
relating the picker of a coffee berry in far-off Brazil and
food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an
extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a
single person in all these millions, including the president
of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny,
infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-
how the only difference between the miner of graphite in
Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how.
Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any
more than the chemist at the factory or the worker in the
oil field--paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the
oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay
nor anyone who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks
nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on
my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs
his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me
less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed,
there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a
pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation
is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of
these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-
how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or
may not be among these items.
No Human Master-Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a
master-mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these
countless actions that bring me into being. No trace of such
a person can be found. Instead, we find the Scottish
economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith's famous
"Invisible Hand" at work in the marketplace. This is the
mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why
do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we
ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a
tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say,
for instance, that a certain molecular configuration
manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men
that could even record, let alone direct, the constant
changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a
tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles; a
tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these
miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more
extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of
creative human energies--millions of tiny bits of know-how
configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to
human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human
necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-
minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only
God could make me. Man can no more direct millions of bits
of know-how so as to bring a pencil into being than he can
put molecules together to create a tree.
That's what I meant when I wrote earlier, "If you can
become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you
can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing."
For, if one is aware that these bits of know-how will
naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into
creative and productive patterns in response to human
necessity and demand--that is, in the absence of
governmental or any other coercive master-minding--then one
will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom:
a faith in free men. Freedom is impossible without this
faith.
Once government has had a monopoly on a creative
activity--the delivery of the mail, for instance--most
individuals will believe that the mail could not be
efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the
reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know
how to do all the things involved in mail delivery. He also
recognizes that no other individual could. These assumptions
are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to
perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any
individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. In
the absence of a faith in free men--unaware that millions of
tiny kinds of know-how would naturally and miraculously form
and cooperate to satisfy this necessity--the individual
cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that the mail
can be delivered only by governmental master-minding.
Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony
on what men can accomplish when free to try, then those with
little faith would have a fair case. However, there is
testimony galore; it's all about us on every hand. Mail
delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance,
to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a
grain combine or a milling machine, or to tens of thousands
of other things.
Delivery? Why, in this age where men have been left
free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world
in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and
in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they
deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less
than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range
or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without
subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the
Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard--halfway around the
world--for less money than the government charges for
delivering a one-ounce letter across the street! (Ed.: Some
things have changed since this essay ran in 1958 and 1983!)
Leave Men Free
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative
energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in
harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus
remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit creative know-
how to freely flow. Have faith that free men will respond to
the "Invisible Hand." This faith will be confirmed. I,
Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of
my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as
practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, and the good
earth.
------------------------------
Remembering Leonard Read, Warren Brookes and F. A. Hayes"
by George Roche
------------------------------
"All of the darkness in the world," Leonard Read once told
me, "cannot overcome the light shed by a single candle." His
great passion was to feed the flame of economic opportunity,
political freedom and moral responsibility. In his essay "I,
Pencil," reprinted in this issue, he did so with marvelous
distinction. Two men who shared Leonard Read's passion
passed away recently: Detroit News syndicated column-ist
Warren Brookes (1929-1991) and Nobel economist F. A. Hayek
(1899-1992).
Brookes wrote hundreds of newspaper articles as well as
special features for Forbes, Reader's Digest, the Wall
Street Journal and National Review. His 1982 book, The
Economy in Mind, is an enduring statement of one fundamental
principle: that the wealth of nations lies not in material
resources but in the minds and hearts of free men. Hayek was
best known for his own 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, which
warned that socialism was a dangerous illusion (later he
would call it, memorably, "the fatal conceit," in his final
book). Socialism, according to Hayek, promised equality
among men, but it delivered equality of servitude--to the
state.
Leonard Read, Warren Brookes and F. A. Hayek--all long-
time friends of Hills-dale whose work appeared in Impri-mis
and the Hillsdale College Press many times over the last two
decades--were truly champions of liberty. As the preview to
this issue points out, they dared to put their faith in free
men--and they challenge us to do the same.
###
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