I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read - Foundation for Economic Education

In a famous essay called ‘I, Pencil’, Leonard Reed pointed out that a simple pencil is made by many different people, some cutting trees down, others mining graphite, others working in pencil factories, or in marketing or management, yet others growing coffee for the lumberjacks and managers to drink. Amid this vast team of collaborating people, no... See more

For, if one is aware that these know-hows 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 people. F... See more

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more

This point is made very eloquently in Leonard E. Read’s 1958 essay written from the perspective of one of our most basic tools, “I, Pencil.” The astounding conclusion is that because the sourcing of raw materials and the methods of production are so dispersed, there is not a single person on the face of the Earth who knows how to make even this sim... See more