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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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