Ever alert to possible environmental problems, the Environmental Protection Agency has closed a mine in Alaska under the Clean Water Act. The mine was not polluting anything. It had not yet begun operations. But the EPA thought that it could, in theory, pollute. So, the EPA shut it down.
“Nip it in the bud!”
Under the Clean Water Act, operations that dump “dredge or fill materials” into wetlands, rivers, lakes, or streams are required to obtain a Section 404 permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The EPA can revoke this permit if there are “unacceptable adverse impacts on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas, wildlife, or recreational areas.”However, the watershed assessment did not evaluate any actual plans for the Pebble Mine, as none have been put forward, instead it evaluates a hypothetical mine.
This is a new policy for the EPA.
This policy will raise the risk of preliminary development for all mining. This is ideal for destroying mining in the United States.
This is the goal of the environmental movement’s public spokesmen. They hate capitalism. They hate economic growth. Whatever the members think about these matters, the environmental movement as a political special-interest group is anti-growth.
The EPA is now clearly in the movement’s hip pocket.
Tariffs and various forms of import quotas prohibit, partially or totally, geographical competition for various products. Domestic firms are granted a quasi monopoly and, generally, a monopoly price. Tariffs injure the consumers within the “protected” area, who are prevented from purchasing from more efficient competitors at a lower price. They also injure the more efficient foreign firms and the consumers of all areas, who are deprived of the advantages of geographic specialization. In a free market, the best resources will tend to be allocated to their most value-productive locations. Blocking interregional trade will force factors to obtain lower remuneration at less efficient and less value-productive tasks…
The arguments for tariffs have one thing in common: they all attempt to prove that the consumers of the protected area are not exploited by the tariff. These attempts are all in vain. There are many arguments. Typical are worries about the continuance of an “unfavorable balance of trade.” But every individual decides on his purchases and therefore determines whether his balance should be “favorable” or “unfavorable”; “unfavorable” is a misleading term because any purchase is the action most favorable for the individual at the time. The same is therefore true for the consolidated balance of a region or a country. There can be no “unfavorable” balance of trade from a region unless the traders so will it, either by selling their gold reserve, or by borrowing from others (the loans being voluntarily granted by creditors).
The absurdity of the protariff arguments can be seen when we carry the idea of a tariff to its logical conclusion—let us say, the case of two individuals, Jones and Smith. This is a valid use of the reductio ad absurdumbecause the same qualitative effects take place when a tariff is levied on a whole nation as when it is levied on one or two people; the difference is merely one of degree.25 Suppose that Jones has a farm, “Jones’ Acres,” and Smith works for him. Having become steeped in protariff ideas, Jones exhorts Smith to “buy Jones’ Acres.” “Keep the money in Jones’ Acres,” “don’t be exploited by the flood of products from the cheap labor of foreigners outside Jones’ Acres,” and similar maxims become the watchword of the two men. To make sure that their aim is accomplished, Jones levies a 1,000-percent tariff on the imports of all goods and services from “abroad,” i.e., from outside the farm. As a result, Jones and Smith see their leisure, or “problems of unemployment,” disappear as they work from dawn to dusk trying to eke out the production of all the goods they desire. Many they cannot raise at all; others they can, given centuries of effort. It is true that they reap the promise of the protectionists: “self-sufficiency,” although the “sufficiency” is bare subsistence instead of a comfortable standard of living. Money is “kept at home,” and they can pay each other very high nominal wages and prices, but the men find that the real value of their wages, in terms of goods, plummets drastically.
Truly we are now back in the situation of the isolated or barter economies of Crusoe and Friday. And that is effectively what the tariff principle amounts to. This principle is an attack on the market, and its logical goal is the self-sufficiency of individual producers; it is a goal that, if realized, would spell poverty for all, and death for most, of the present world population. It would be a regression from civilization to barbarism.
…The State Department’s director of policy planning, Kiron Skinner, noted, “It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” That’s not strictly correct, given Japan’s aggressive advance a few decades ago. But for some, the PRC still fits the historic stereotype of the “Yellow Peril,” which makes China seem more credible as a global menace.
The Pentagon report describes the alleged threat in great detail. Ironically, Beijing’s behavior sounds a lot like that of America once the latter broke free of British control.
Chinese leaders, asserts the Pentagon, “are focused on realizing a powerful and prosperous China that is equipped with a ‘world-class’ military, securing China’s status as a great power with the aim of emerging as the preeminent power in the Indo-Pacific region.” The People’s Liberation Army is expected to be “able to fight and win wars, deter potential adversaries, and secure Chinese national interests overseas, including a growing emphasis on the importance of the maritime and information domains, offensive air operations, long-distance mobility operations, and space and cyber operations.”
But the military is not Beijing’s only weapon. “China conducts influence operations against media, cultural business academic, and policy communities of the United States, other countries, and international institutions to achieve outcomes favorable to its security and military strategy objectives,” says the Pentagon. The goal is to convince others “to accept China’s narrative surrounding its priorities.”
Washington became dominant in its own region by dismembering Mexico, seizing half of that nation’s territory. Threats of military action also led to a favorable settlement along America’s northern border. Overwhelming U.S. power enabled the seizure of Cuba in 1898 and routine interventions in Latin America during the early 20th century. American economic and cultural influence grew apace. Washington gained global ascendency after World War II and since then has robustly promoted its “narrative surrounding its priorities.
Another Chinese replay of American history can be seen in its challenge to the global leader. Warns the Pentagon, Beijing is seeking “to degrade core U.S. operational and technological advantages.” America once enjoyed both rising population and productivity, moving it ahead of the then-dominant United Kingdom. Its world-class armed forces were forged in World War I and especially World War II, after which it achieved qualitative military superiority. America has held onto this advantage ever since, though at significant cost.
Maybe you’ve noticed the frenzied U.S. Government attempt to replace Venezuela’s duly elected hood-ornament — PresideNT Nicolas Maduro — with Juan Guaido, a nearly unknown U.S. prepped Venezuelan politician?
Why are they trying to do that?…
So, what about this persistent two-decade attack on Venezuela? Whim, whimsey, hobby, madness, or is there more to the story?
Consider this headline from September 2017, only a few months before Venezuela’s current problems started – – –
And this before the U.S. supported and/or instigated temporary coup against super-popular and certified by Jimmy Carter Mr. Chavez – – –
…it must be noted that Iraq is attempting to switch to the euro as its currency for settling oil exports, and that Venezuelais reportedly planning to follow suit.–The Japan Times: November 20, 2000
“So,” you may be thinking, “What’s the big deal with that?”
Well, because of a 1974 agreement cobbled together by the Nixon administration between the U.S. and Saudis, nearly all oil trade in the world ended up requiring U.S. dollars.
Not coincidentally, this was just three years after Nixon, attempting to finish replacing the gold standard with the U.S. paper-dollar standard, closed the gold window and thus threatened to throw the world economy into chaos. This explains a lot more than most folks realize.
Remember the “petro dollar?” Well, thanks to the Saudi/U.S. established oil-for-dollars tradition, the Brits, Germans, Japanese — in fact just about everyone — had to keep dollars on hand to pay for their oil imports.
And the oil sellers also ended up with a lot of dollars. And so did the countries they bought stuff from. And the dollar tradition spread to trade in other commodities as well. That meant that a large aggregate of U.S. dollars stayed overseas and didn’t return to the U.S.
Experts estimate that “majority of cash … outside the United States” is as much as 80% of the U.S. dollars in circulation. All that money overseas has a lot to do with the fact that everyone has to pay for oil, etc., with dollars.
As Case Sprenkle of the University of Illinois puts it, “Insofar as the money remains abroad and is not used to purchase goods or services from the country that printed it, it serves as an interest-free loan from poor countries to the rich.”
That’s mostly how Uncle Sam is able to run-up such huge budget deficits without causing inflation. So far.
But what happens if people overseas stop using the dollar — and discover the only place they can spend it now is back here in the good ole’ U.S. of A.?
What would happen if the Saudi Arabians said they didn’t want to be paid [for oil] in dollars anymore, but wanted instead, to be paid, say in yen. There would be inflation that would make the 15 to 20 percent inflation in the early 80’s look good.—Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NEW MEXICO, C-SPAN II, 18 May 1995 ~12:33:55 PM
Unfortunately, selling oil for something other than U.S. dollars isn’t the only thing threatening the paper-standard. It’s also become the norm for governments and central banks to stockpile U.S. Treasuries to support their own currencies.
So, if a country reduces its stock-pile of U.S. Treasuries, either by selling them off or no longer rolling them over when they reach maturity — and replaces them with something else, as in the past, gold perhaps — this also threatens the U.S. dollar paper-standard.
The problem is, the paper-standard is mostly psychological. It’s literally a con — that is, confidence — game and when the confidence evaporates, game over.
And it’s very difficult to enforce confidence, no matter how many aircraft carriers, etc. you deploy. Or to predict when the confidence will implode.
As former FED Chair Alan Greenspan confessed,
We can readily describe this process, but, to date, economists have been unable to anticipate sharp reversals in confidence. Collapsing confidence is generally described as a bursting bubble, an event incontrovertibly evident only in retrospect. –Alan Greenspan, “New challenges for monetary policy”
And these days, instead of cash paper money, most of those Treasury bonds and dollars are now nothing more than electronic zeros and ones, just accounting entries in computer memories that circle the globe at about the speed of light — and can pretty much land anywhere instantly. Ah-oh!
So now we know the likely basis of this frenzied attempt to replace Venzuela’s current hood-ornament. Before he replaces the dollar. AND why Uncle was almost as desperate to replace the previous hood decoration, Mr. Chavez.
Perhaps you also noticed from that Nov. 2000 Japan Times article above that at the turn of the century, “Iraq [was] attempting to switch to the euro as its currency for settling oil exports” too?
“Attempting” because as a result of the settlement ending the first U.S./Iraq so-called “War,” waged by Bush Sr., and otherwise known as “Desert Storm,” Iraq had to get U.N. permission. Yes, in case you don’t remember, there were twoso-called Iraq “Wars.”
In due course, the U.N. bureaucrats ruled that Iraq could indeed sell it’s oil for any currency it chose. In due course, Iraqi Food for Oil was paid for in euros rather than in dollars. Ah-oh!
Subsequently, seizing on the 911 attacks as the illegitimate and completely bogus excuse, George Bush Jr. and his cronies told at least 935 documented and recorded falsehoods to get “us” to attack the men, women and children of Iraq for the second time.
Here’s the timeline:
March 2000, Iraq announces it’s intention to change Oil for Food to euros and, according to the Oct. 12, 2000 Oil & Gas News, as of Sunday, Oct. 8, the Iraq central bank announced it had begun to buy European currencies.
Twelve months later in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 “911” attacks — and using them as an illegitimate excuse — Bush Jr., Dick Cheney & Company start their bogus anti-Iraq propaganda campaign.
March 19, 2003, 18 months after 911, based on his 935+ lies, U.S. strongman Bush Jr., following in his fathers footsteps, again attacks the men, women and children of Iraq.
And, emphatically punctuating that paper-standard connection, one of the first executive orders Herr Bush Jr. signed after declaring victory on May 2, 2003 “switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.”
So perhaps not all U.S. meddlings, assassinations, coups, invasions, regime changes, “wars,” and sanctions are done purely on whim or whimsey, although given the sheer volume of them — and with Operation Just Cause as an example — we can’t rule-out hobby and/or madness.
And there’s a missing piece. Ever since The Church Committee hearings uncovered it, we know the U.S. MSM (Main Stream Media) has been in cahoots with C.I.A./U.S. plots, lies, and scams. Bush Jr.’s Iraq war-crime with his minimum of 935 falsehoods is a good example. And unfortunately, little has changed.
In fact, it’s gotten worse. The one-sided coverage of Mr. Maduro proves nearly complete control in the U.S. Further, C.I.A. media meddling and control have expanded world-wide. Britain is particularly well controlled. German journalist Udo Ulfkotte explains the big picture this way — “We All Lie for the CIA.”
Because of this wide-spread CIA influence, there’s a marker for a standard U.S. Government tactic we can look for as a harbinger of interventions: Demonization – – –
“Well Jim, it is very important in a democracy that you have the support of the people. One of the reasons why [U.S. President] George [Herbert Walker] Bush had to demonize [Iraq’s President] Saddam Hussein was to get the support of the people, and [U.S. President] Bill Clinton has done the same thing, Vice President Gore has done the same thing with respect to [Serbian President] Milosevic.” —Raymond Tanter, Fmr. Natl. Security Council Staffer, WATCH IT!, MSNBC, 2 Apr 1999, ~11:56:45 AM EST
For the Progressive Democratic “Resistance” (PDR), post-Modernism is in full flower. They have ruled objective reality inadmissible. There are only stories — his story, her story, they’s story, zhe’s story, and you must believe them because they come out of lived experience — for instance the lived experience of having lost a sure-thing presidential election to a cartoon character with zero political experience, and then having lost the grand inquisition to oust him. For the PDRs, the metaphysical concept of reality refers to some land of dark make-believe over a distant horizon where numbers supposedly add up (ha!) and the actions of persons are said to entail a strange cosmic condition known as consequence…
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared yesterday that we are in a constitutional crisis. You’re darn tootin’ we are, but it’s not coming from the flaccid threats of legal imbecile Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who wants to prosecute the Attorney General, Mr. Barr, for refusing to make public grand jury records in the Mueller report — since the law requires Mr. Barr to not disclose the material. The crisis she mis-identifies is the coming indictment of so many supposedly untouchable and hallowed public figures, up to and including the former president, Mr. Obama, and the former head of CIA, Mr. Brennan, and Director of National Security, Mr. Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the sainted Mr. Mueller, a whole posse of former Intel Community subalterns, and an unholy host of creeping, crawling, and flying swamp creatures from Glenn Simpson to the shyster lawyers at DNC law firm Perkins Coie, to the errand boys at the Cable News Networks, Wash-Po and The New York Times who trafficked in leaked perfidious documents — that the cumulative institutional damage will destroy public confidence in constitutional government per se.
The true aim of these “scholar activists,” as many academics have begun calling themselves, is to propagate socialism by redefining capitalism to encompass every evil of human history.
After the collapse of the housing market in 2008, professional historians gave birth to a new sub-field of history usually referred to as “the new history of capitalism.” Economic history is hardly novel, but the new history of capitalism takes the approach that capitalism is the “thing” that needs to be explained. In the past decade, this field has become one of the most fashionable trends in the history profession, with centers for the study of capitalism being established at Cornell and the University of Georgia.
Predictably, the scholarship that falls under this label is replete with problems. Most self-described “historians of capitalism” know nothing of economic theory even as they try to incorporate it into their writings. Seth Rockman, from Brown University, for instance, supports his analysis of antebellum Baltimore by quoting Adam Smith’s exposition of the labor theory of value. Rockman seems to be taking a sly shot at proponents of capitalism—“even your precious Adam Smith believes labor is the source of value”—but he appears to be entirely unaware that economists abandoned the labor theory of value more than a century ago.1
These historians have also uniformly accepted that slavery and capitalism are inextricably linked. This idea has been around since at least 1944, when the Marxist historian Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery, arguing that British industrialization depended on the slave economy of Barbados.2 But the idea has evolved to the point that historians have established a consensus on claims that defy empirical substantiation… Read the rest of this entry »
Tariffs make imported cars $4000 more expensive. Domestic manufacturers jack their price to $1000 less. You lose, again. Tariffs are a bankster issue.
Steel tariffs mandate buying expensive domestic steel. Only often it does not get bought. Here is an energy balance equation like you were supposed to learn in school.
High cost + limited budget = no project + no jobs.
Tariffs are the inverse of a septic tank. It all sinks to the bottom, where the consumer lies.
As stated in Mr. North’s post most suffer, selected few profit, you pay the final bill.
For the most part no one cares much about buy American when price is (always) the issue. If we did Walmart wouldn’t exist.
If I were to come to you and say “What this country needs is higher taxes in order to make us all rich,” you would correctly conclude that I had lost my mind or my principles. But if I were to come to you and say, “What this country needs is higher tariffs to make us all rich,” a considerable number of you would say, “You know, he’s absolutely right.”
What you need to understand is that these two statements are the same, economically speaking: “What this country needs is higher taxes to make us rich” and “What this country needs is higher tariffs to make us rich.”
Why are they the same? Because a tariff is a tax. This is the “dirty little secret” that every promoter of higher tariffs never tells you. It is the secret revealed by economic analysis ever since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), which is why those people who publicly promote tariffs are very seldom trained economists, and why those few who are economists are devoted followers of John Maynard Keynes and hostile to the idea of economic freedom.
Something for Nothing?
The fundamental principle of economics is the fact of scarcity: “At zero price, there will be greater demand for most goods than there is supply of these goods.” This means that whenever we hear someone offer a scheme that promises us something for nothing, especially a scheme enforced by the State, we should be on the alert. “Put your hand upon your wallet and your back against the wall!”
The defenders of tariffs insist that tariffs are the one remarkable exception to the logic of economics. We can raise tariffs (get the government to collect more sales taxes on imported goods), and in doing so, stimulate the economy and increase our nation’s per capita wealth. Let’s think about this for a moment. Higher sales taxes are beneficial to the economy? That is what the tariff advocate is saying, though he never says it this way. (If he said it this way. nobody would believe him.)
This is Keynesianism with a vengeance: tax and tax, spend and spend. This is the tax collectors’ siren song. “We’ll take your money, and you’ll be so much better off!” This is the economics of the New Deal: tax ourselves rich. Yet conservatives buy this argument almost every time when the word “tariff” is substituted for “tax,” unless they have read and have also understood Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson or some similar free market economics book. They instinctively have faith in word magic: substitute a different word, and the laws of economics no longer apply.
The argument for tariffs as wealth-creating devices is the equivalent of the logic of the perpetual motion machine. It is the logic of something for nothing. Only a few pathetic, naïve, and misinformed souls ever get taken in by the professional hustlers who sell them on the idea of investing in some perpetual motion machine project. Unfortunately, millions upon millions of voters are quite willing to open their wallets to the Federal government whenever the politicians promise endless wealth for all Americans–through higher tariffs… Read the rest of this entry »
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 these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
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. 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, the wise 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 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.
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 the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? 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 sixty 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. 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 [Sri Lanka]. Consider these 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 candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all 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 involve 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 rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia] 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.
No One Knows
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 can 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 any 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 Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. 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 know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, “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 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. 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. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. 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. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “masterminding.”
Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women 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 and 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 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!
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 these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women 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, the good earth…
No one should be forced to attend church. By the same token, no one should be force to submit to a state-approved education. For that matter, no one should be forced to fund a state-approved school any more than he should be forced to fund a state-approved church. The state has no more business in education than it does in religion.
Imagine if Congress were to enact a law that required everyone to attend church on Sundays. The overwhelming majority of Americans would go up in arms. The concept of religious liberty is so deeply ingrained in our American heritage that there is no way that people, including devout Christians, would accept such a law. That heritage was enshrined in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from enacting such a law.
Now, suppose things had been the exact opposite. Suppose that from the beginning, the Constitution had authorized Congress to enact compulsory church-attendance laws. Suppose that immediately after the Constitution called the federal government into existence, Congress had enacted a law requiring parents to send their children to church, in order to be educated on religious, moral, ethical, and Biblical principles. Suppose that we had been living with that national compulsory church-attendance law for the entire history of the United States.
Now suppose we libertarians were to advocate the repeal of the church-attendance law, which would enable families to decide for themselves whether to send their children to church or not. Can you imagine the outcry?
“Are you libertarians crazy? If we let families make that decision, no one would send their children to church. Most parents are just too irresponsible. How could we be certain that children would receive the right education and training when it comes to morality, ethics, and religion? Wouldn’t some parents teach their children to be atheists or, even worse, to worship Satan? No, you libertarians are all off base. People aren’t ready for that type of freedom. Repealing the church-attendance law would destroy the moral, religious, and ethical foundation of American society.”
After all, isn’t that the mindset of many Americans when they hear libertarians calling for the repeal of compulsory school-attendance laws? Don’t they say that people just aren’t ready for that type of freedom — that parents are too irresponsible — that children wouldn’t get educated — and that a free-market educational system would destroy America?
But the fact is that there is no difference in principle between religious liberty and educational liberty. Just as people shouldn’t be forced to send their children to church, they shouldn’t be forced to send their children to a state-approved organization for secular education and training. Families have the natural, God-given right to make educational decisions for their children without state interference or meddling, just as they do with respect to religious decisions…
