Pencils

In this essay, Kevin D. Williamson explains that nobody knows how to make a pencil:

In his classic short story “I, Pencil,” economist Leonard Read considers the incomprehensible complexity involved in the production of a simple No. 2 pencil: the expertise in design, forestry, mining, metallurgy, engineering, transportation, support services, logistics, architecture, chemistry, machining, and other fields of knowledge necessary to create a product so common, so humble, and so cheap as to have become both ubiquitous and disposable. Read’s conclusion, which is one of those fascinating truths so obvious that nobody appreciates them, is that nobody knows how to make a pencil. Nobody is in charge of the operation, and nobody understands it end to end. From the assembly-line worker to the president of the pencil company, thousands or millions of people have tiny, discrete pieces of knowledge about the process, but no coordinating authority organizes their efforts.

That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation. A mobile phone is a much more complicated thing than a No. 2 pencil, but both are the products of spontaneous order — of systems that are, in the words of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, the “products of human action, but not of human design.”

Is there some engineer geek locked up in a basement somewhere who can explain every detail of how a pencil is manufactured? Almost certainly. But that one person cannot raise a forest of pine and rubber trees, lumberjack them, operate a drag line at a bauxite or graphite mine, build the machines that build the machines that build the pencils, drive the truck that delivers the pencils, or manage the finances of the Ubiquitous Pencil Manufacturing Corporation. It happens "invisibly" -- in the sense that all those industries come together to make a pencil, but all those industries contribute to the manufacture and delivery of other products, as well. A cheap pencil is clear evidence of a functional economic and social system.

He goes on to point out that in Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service, we see the clear evidence of what happens when a single entity tries to make a pencil: they fail. By any commercial and financial standard, both of those organizations are utter failures. But they endure because we the taxpayers are forced by the government to support them. Williamson:

Which is something to keep in mind the next time somebody promises to “solve” our health-care challenges or unemployment. Washington is packed to the gills with people who believe that they have the ability to design an intelligent national health-care system, but there is not one who does — no Democrat, no Republican, no independent. The information burden is just too vast. Washington is not only full of people who do not know what they are talking about, it is full of people who do not know that they do not know what they are talking about. That is no model for social change. Your pencil and your phone are.

And that is why socialized medicine -- "Obamacare" in this country -- has never worked and never will. The government can't make a pencil; they sure as hell can't manage the most complex industry in the country with anything like efficiency.