Possibly the greatest economics essay EVER
It has been 50 years since the initial publication of Leonard Read's I, Pencil. If only today's political "leaders" would read it and take its lessons to heart, we'd be out of our current economic mess in very little time. And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a yacht.
"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 which 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 it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
... 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 know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding!"
It takes millions of people the world over to make a pencil, and not a single one of them knows how the entire process works. Yet the government thinks a handful of appointed people have enough knowledge to manage the entire economy. As an avowed individualist and ethical egoist, I have to defend myself against criticism of "selfishness" and "conceit" from both the Left and Right, but I could never maintain such a high level of arrogance.