This essay is truly one for the ages.I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do.You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. 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. What do you see? Why, in this area 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! Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.Eloquent. That’s not just a national disease. Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read, Dec. 1958 Introduction, by Milton Friedman. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. The Foundation publishes The Freeman, an award-winning monthly journal of ideas in the fields of economics, history, and moral philosophy. 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. Although a few of the manufacturing details and place names have changed,the principles endure. 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. How utterly preposterous, and mournfully tragic! 33 0 obj Students should then either watch “I, Pencil: The Movie” from Competitive Enterprise Institute or read/listen to “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read (Text, PDF, and audio). Freedom is impossible without this faith.Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. "I, Pencil" is an essay by Leonard Read. Listen to Audio Book. 26 0 obj

I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. <> As I sat contemplating the miraculous make-up of an ordinary lead pencil, the thought flashed in mind: I'll bet there isn't a person on earth who knows how to make even so simple a thing as a pencil.

These legions are among my antecedents.Consider the millwork in San Leandro. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. We cannot, except in superficial terms. Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? 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 know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. 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? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant, which supplies the mill's power!Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting 60 carloads of slats across the nation.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.

Their motivation is other than me. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil.“It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. Leonard could have written “I, Car” or “I, Airplane,” but choosing those more complex items would have muted the message. What is black nickel and how is it applied?

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