Laissez faire |

November 15, 2019December 9, 2019

PayPal & Pornhub

For about ten years now, every time the owner of some platform or another decides, for whatever reason, to change its terms, you’ll almost immediately hear a wild outcry for “justice,” followed by a backlash against “robbing people of their livelihood,” and then there often begins the predictable protests against “late-stage capitalism” and “unregulated markets” and “disempowerment.” Et cetera.

(Please note and remember: nowhere have markets ever been completely unregulated, and they most certainly are not today.)

This phenomena happened with Google.

This happened with YouTube.

This happened with Bing.

This happened with Facebook.

This happened with Patreon.

This happened with Tumblr.

This happened with Reddit and confounded people with college educations.

This happened with Instagram and confused Erika Lust, the porn director mentioned below.

This happened with many, many other companies, some of which (and there is a clue here) went out of business for the decisions they made, and it will continue to happen.

Yesterday, it happened (again) with PayPal, so that as of yesterday PayPal now no longer “partners with” PornHub.

Very big deal, I know. And yet to judge from the outcry, you’d think it was armageddon.

PayPal’s decision may or may not have had something to do with the recent and horrifying story which hit headlines October 30th.

This story concerns a 15-year-old girl who’d been missing for a year and who was then spotted in 58 videos which had been uploaded to Pornhub — as well as Snapchat and Periscope — videos which show the girl, who’d been abducted, being repeatedly raped by her abductor. These videos proved sickeningly popular, and I have a very good idea about why precisely this is, but that’s a subject for a later post.

It is, I’m afraid, time again for me to state the obvious — the obvious and the fundamental — and I admit I find it exceptionally disheartening that such elementary things are so poorly understood:

These are privately owned companies. They can change their terms if they want, and they can change them whenever they want, as you can leave and delete them from your life whenever you want. Users did not use these platforms before they existed, and users do not now suddenly have claim to ownership or a say in how these privately owned companies choose to run their business. Users use these platforms by choice. If these platforms change their terms of service, they are allowed to. Users can write letters and can post as much as they’d like on their own platforms and on any other platforms that allow it, but there is nothing wrong with private companies doing this, and there’s (currently) nothing illegal about it, nor should there ever be. PayPal can choose to do business with Pornhub, or not.

This is not at all a complicated subject. The fact that so many putatively educated people don’t understand something so elementary is a sad testament to the world’s understanding of basic economic principle. You know what it’s like? It’s like a fucking joke to me.

Thanks entirely to social media, a whole new subculture and a whole new generation has recently discovered a term which, for the most part, they did not know anything about even ten years ago. This partially explains why so many among this generation and among this subculture use the old and venerable term as if it were somehow novel and even new.

But in actuality, this term — and, more precisely, the principle behind the term — is something which many have fought tirelessly for for decades and even centuries: fought for in full, I should say, by which I mean, in every aspect of human life.

That term is “decriminalization.”

Decriminalization is similar to deregulation and to legalization, but it is not synonymous.

You’ll be excused, by the way, if you don’t quite recognize the full word — decriminalization — since the term is these days most often used in truncated form, presumably to fit character-count and the trendy terminology of social-media speak: decrim.

Today, the overwhelming majority of people whom you’ll hear discussing decrim are referring to one and only one industry, and that industry is not, unfortunately, the healthcare industry with all its licensing-law monopolies and mandatory health-insurance laws and so forth.

Nor is it unfortunately in reference to zoning laws.

It is not in context of nationalizing and socializing and subsidizing any of the many arms of agriculture, nor any of its offshoot industries, and it’s not about decriminalizing property rights on Native American Indian Reservations.

It also, I regret, has nothing to do with government bailouts of banks or automobile companies, nor does it concern the thousands and thousands of bureaucratic pages added to the Federal Register each year, nor the preposterous gambling laws in America, which are often backed with equal fervor by left-wingers and right-wingers alike.

It’s not about decriminalizing those who don’t comply with mandatory solar-panel laws, or any other mandatory “renewable energy” laws, and it has nothing to do with emissions and the sheer stupidity of officially labeling CO2 (one of the building blocks of life) a “pollutant.”

Neither does it have anything to do with decriminalizing the building of new nuclear reactors, nor to hydraulic fracturing decrim, nor to decriminalizing waste-disposal — specifically by abolishing any and all mandatory recycling laws, which mandatory laws have generated astronomically more pollution and waste.

It’s not about decriminalizing our absurd drinking-age laws, which so many countries in the world do not have — to no detriment whatsoever — and it’s not any decrim related to drugs or alcohol or tobacco or firearms or firecrackers or compulsory education or military conscription or progressive taxation or mandatory licensing laws for any number of other industries, or anything like this. Nor is it about decriminalizing all marriage, so that this institution is separated from the state entirely. Neither is it about any and all forms of coercive welfare, including but certainly not limited to all publicly funded, non-voluntary healthcare subsidization. (You may, of course, voluntarily subsidize any form of welfare-pool or “safety net” you’d like, as was once the case, should anybody choose to organize one, instead of relying upon government compulsion to do it.)

Nor, I very much regret, is it about decrim of all interstate trade and all international trade by abolishing all trade tariffs and all prohibitions against such trade.

Today, rather, decrim is used almost exclusively in the context of the sex industry.

I, along with many others who advocate full unadulterated laissez-faire, have fought long for the total decriminalization of all voluntary trade and consensual transactions, which of course includes drugs, sex, rock-and-roll, gambling, et al, and I have done so for a very long time, and I’m on written record as having done so, and over this subject I’ve lost many people whom I thought were friends. My convictions remain.

When, however, any industry, no matter what that industry is, explicitly pedals pedophilia and rape and other atrocity exhibitions, it falls squarely within the proper jurisdiction of the law. This of course goes without saying, though perhaps not for some.

I am not, for the record, talking about the depiction of non-consensual strangulation and other acts of extreme violence (including snuff), unspeakably disgusting as I find it, which depictions of violence are everywhere in porn — so much so, incidentally, that a number of so-called sex-positives (a bullshit term if ever there was one, and I say that primarily because people who coin terms like this are precisely the people who can’t conceive that there are humans who are completely positive about sex, to the point of loving it — yes — who are open and experimental and not phobic in the least, and yet who nonetheless abhor violence and phoniness and, in addition to that, and more importantly, actually like to spend time thinking about and reading about and talking about a great many other things besides sex), such as Dan Savage now saying:

“There’s this normalization of strangulation and other violence during sex — strangulation without asking: one recent survey showed 13% of sexually active girls aged 14 to 17 had been choked nonconsensually.”

Yes, you read that age-range right: 14 years old to 17 years old, and the boys are statedly getting this from the “edgy” porn they watch.

Quoting porn director Erika Lust, who laments nominally — and only nominally — that “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene and not just within a BDSM context. These are presented as standard ways to have sex when, in fact, they are niches…. Young people will go to the internet for answers. Many people’s first exposure to sex is hardcore porn. [It teaches children] that violence and degradation is standard.” (Niche? Hardcore? Violent? Degrading? But I regard “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting” as nonsense boring vanilla shit, strictly for squares. And don’t even get me started on the subject of actual “love” and emotional connection between two human beings who have brains and who delight in each other’s company even apart from sex. But if you lament it, Ms. Lust, one wonders why you yourself simply don’t stop contributing to it as “the standard,” and work instead to keep it, as you say, “niche.” Upon second thought, though, so what? Why not make it the standard? What’s the problem with that? What’s the problem with 14-year-old boys and girls watching mere depictions of extraordinarily violent nonconsensual sex acts, including staged snuff and necrophilia? Where’s the problem? I see none. What’s the problem with making depicted nonconsensual strangulation and any and all other forms of violence and brutality and “degradation,” as you say, standard and non-niche, since everyone knows that fantasy enactments, no matter how bloody and brutal and degrading and disgusting and pathological they may appear [to the prudish and religious, of course], are not real life, and that’s one of the main reasons for porn, isn’t it? And, anyway, sex-positivity forbids drawing any such patriarchal distinctions as “standard and non-standard” — because when you get right down to it, there isn’t a standard, and for a porn director to presume any sort of demarcation-of-standard, especially a white Scandinavian female porn director, is, if I may speak frankly, privileged, non-inclusive, hegemonistic, sexist, and quite possibly even racist.)

Other sex-positives, if you’ll permit me further use of this bullshit terminology, sex-positives who still work in porn, discuss sex-trafficking and the number of scenes that take place without the performer’s consent, and this, if you ever feel like making yourself sick and if you feel like implanting ghastly images inside your brain that you will never expunge, is a topic you may read about for weeks which stretch into months and months. But I don’t recommend it.

Yes, the porn industry would normalize this, just as Erika Lust correctly notes. They would normalize this and much more. Normalizing is a type of desensitization. Escalation of tastes is largely for this reason, particularly among men, commonplace, and this is not — not by any reasonable person of whom I know — denied.

Recently, in fact, the discussion — if it can even be called that — has fixated (to the point of absurdity) upon whether or not sex can be an “addiction,” or is it just “potentially compulsive.”

This is an absolute non-issue. It’s also stupidly basic.

All addictions involve compulsion — all of them — and virtually all pleasurable things are “potentially compulsive,” including something as fundamental as eating food.

Furthermore, some of the most difficult compulsions to treat and overcome are not technically “addictions,” anorexia and gambling being two of the most notorious. (I once had a customer — Dr. Berry, an M.D. in psychiatry, recently retired at the time that I knew him, who’d graduated top of his class from Stanford School of Medicine — tell me that in his decades of professional experience the toughest compulsion to treat “by far” [his words] was not heroin or meth or tobacco or any other drug or substance, but gambling.)

So please let me repeat this: PayPal, like any and every privately owned company, may partner with whomever they voluntarily, consensually fucking choose, and they can withdraw that consent, just as Pornhub can stop accepting credit cards or whatever, and just as they can all change their terms of service, and they can buy-out Venmo if Venmo chooses to sell (which Venmo consensually did), and you or I can start up a new payment-processing company or invent an app that people can download onto their phones and soon not be able to live without, or we can start-up a new porn platform — or all of the above — or whatever other 101 shit.

Note also that to the extent that laissez faire does exist, when a platform enacts a policy which causes users to leave, new businesses and companies are free to start up and fill this newly created void which, in enacting whatever policy, opened up a demand — and that’s exactly what we’ve always seen and will continue to see, until government and its advocates implement protectionism. (The rivers of tears had not finished drying over Patreon’s change-of-terms before a hundred new and better platforms sprung up, almost overnight, to take its place. Meanwhile, we watch Patreon’s popularity gradually but inexorably fade. It’s called Creative Destruction.)

It is worth noting here, as well, if only in passing and in closing, that the overwhelming majority of advocates for sex-industry decrim are leftist-progressive-socialists, who, as strident and hysterical as they are for decrim, would, however, CRIMINALIZE any number of other industries (including, for example, PayPal’s right not to do business with whomever they choose [see also most of the list above]); and this is especially true, I’ve noticed, of the psychologists and pseudo-neuropsychs arguing on behalf of the sex industry (but no other industry) for decrim, all of whom, without a single exception in my personal experience, are economically illiterate — one even going so far as to say that “there are no good billionaires.” (He wrote this on a phone or computer or tablet invented and brought into existence by a billionaire, in the comfort of a first-world society made possible by billionaire wealth, upon a platform created and popularized by a billionaire. But I’m quibbling, I know.)

This encapsulates why this group will never ultimately fully succeed in the cause — a cause I support though not in mere isolation without reference to its underpinnings — never fully, I say, because they don’t understand the principle behind the cause, which is this.

July 16, 2018July 24, 2018

Plastic Straws are a “Gateway Plastic” as Alcohol and Marijuana are a Gateway Drug

Yes, you read that headline correctly.

It is real.

It has come to this:

2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream. Once the lonely cause of environmental cranks, now everyone wants to eliminate these suckers from daily life.

In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris to Tom Brady have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic and The Atlantic have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice is now treating their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.

(Source)

This will go down in world history as an example of perfect propaganda — in large part because you’ll very soon start hearing how effective these bans have been, despite the fact that they’re not the real problem, and despite the fact that it’s the weight of plastic that should most concern environmentalists, not the raw number of plastic things used, or whether those objects are recyclable.

[M]ost plastic, whatever form it enters the ocean as, will eventually be broken up into much smaller pieces known as micro-plastics. It is these micro-plastics that … pile up on the ocean floor, and leech into the stomachs and flesh of sea creatures.

Reducing the amount of micro-plastics in the ocean thus requires cutting down on the aggregate weight of plastics entering the ocean each year. It cannot be stressed enough that straws, by weight, are a tiny portion of this plastic: At most, straws account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the ocean each year, according to the Associated Press .02 percent of all plastic waste. The pollution problem posed by straws looks even smaller when considering that the United States is responsible for about ONE PERCENT [my emphasis] of plastic waste entering the oceans, with straws being a smaller percentage still.

As countless experts have stressed, truly addressing the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source of this pollution, namely all the uncollected litter from poorer coastal countries that lack developed waste management systems.

Straw banners have proven stubbornly resistant to this logic. Instead, they have chosen to rely on either debunked statistics (such as the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, which was the product of a 9-year-old’s research) or totally unproven notions (like the theory that straws are a “gateway plastic“) in order to justify petty prohibitions on innocuous straws.

(Ibid)

Yes, 2018, the year the left took an even sharper and more dangerous turn:

Coming out OFFICIALLY against freedom of speech.

The year they sought to jail people who use plastic straws.

The year bar-straws were labeled a “gateway plastic”(!)

(Please note that, all who think me hyperbolic whenever I say the left and the right are merely two sides of the same penny, which they are.)

The year Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws — and Winds Up Using MORE Plastic because of It

The year they doubled-down on the debunked idea that Scandinavia is a model for “democratic socialism”

The year they blinded themselves one time too many in seeking to resurrect the horrific and immoral ideology responsible for more death and destruction than any other ideology in world history:

The Questions Stephen Colbert Should Have Asked Democratic Socialist “Rock Star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

It’s been a very bad, sad year.

And it’s only halfway through.

April 24, 2018April 30, 2018

If Government Doesn’t Provide It, It Will Never Be Provided: The Entrenchment Fallacy

In response to my latest book, which is an explicit espousal of laissez-faire, I’ve already gotten a few emails and messages with the exact comments I anticipated — anticipated from the moment I first conceived the idea, in fact, because I’ve been fielding these very same questions for well over a decade now.

My main character’s name is Kristy Reed, and today I received the following:

“Let me ask you: Did Kristy use the public libraries?”

The questioner might just as well have asked:

“Did Kristy live in government-sponsored homes when he lived on the Indian Reservation?”

Because it’s exactly the same sort of question.

Or the question could also have been:

“Do the citizens of North Korea eat the food that their government provides them?”

Or:

“Did the Cambodian people live in the homes Pol Pot provided them?”

The answer is yes — because government holds a (coercive) monopoly on such things.

There’s a world of difference between political power and economic power.

It is not true, however — it is patently, provably false — that if government doesn’t provide it, it won’t be provided.

Private libraries, like private bookstores, both of which already exist, would exist more abundantly if government weren’t involved.

This illustrates perfectly the principle of entrenchment: the Entrenchment Fallacy.

It’s a well-known and well-observed phenomena that in, for instance, communist regimes, people rapidly become so accustomed to government providing for them that in virtually no time at all, it becomes inconceivable to these same people — even those who were once self-sufficient — that human life can flourish without government intervention.

The same phenomena once happened with mafia protection: people got so used to it that they couldn’t imagine life without it.

So the first, among many, questions I ask my government-loving interrogators:

Why stop at public libraries?

And where do you stop if the principle is that government doesn’t just protect but provides?

Food, clothing, and shelter are by far the most urgent human needs. Should government provide all this?

If not, why not?

And do you then regard the Indian Reservations as a successful government program — which, after all, the book is about?

There are 5,000 arguments against laissez faire — and every single one of them is demonstrably incorrect, predicated upon fraudulent premises.

Let me also note that laissez-faire proponents like me, who love animals and nature very much, we’re the only people pressed to elaborate on precisely how our proposed system will play-out.

Democrats and Republicans all across the entire spectrum, with all their jargon and easy platitudes, they’re not held to such standards — and good thing for them, because no one could ever in a million years lay out a logical argument for the elaboration of either of those systems, which are really the same system, with all its corruption and sheer waste and mushrooming bureaus and the unforeseeable red-tape-bandaids and endless fingers-in-the-dykes to plug-up the endlessly springing leaks.

Most of the questions I receive about laissez faire I’ve addressed innumerable times before.

Here are hyperlinks (the majority, though not all, by me) to the most common queries — and so if you’re about to hammer me with hostility, your task is to first read all that you see below and process it, and if your questions have still not been answered, you may then hammer away.

Climate change

Climate change and glaciers

Life expectancy myths

Free-market medicine 1

Free-market medicine 2

Free-market medicine 3

Energy

Nuclear energy

Peak oil

Renewables and sustainable energy

Public Roads and Highways: Bloodbaths and Endless Gridlock

Unions

Zoning: Houston — 4th Biggest City in America — has No Zoning Laws

Privatize the Safety Net 1

Privatize the Safety Net 2

Economic Depression

The Great Depression

Articles of the Confederation

Where Does Government Come from — and Why?

Food Production

How Human Progress and Increased Populations Have Made the World Cleaner and Better

Water

Recycling and waste disposal

Glass Recycling

Industry and the Impossibility of Centrally Planning economies

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, “Why I Left Greenpeace”

Socialism, Collectivism, Environmentalism

Twentieth Century Hong Kong: a Textbook Example of Laissez-Faire Success

Socialism, Communism, and Welfare Statism: Defining the Terms

Now, then:

For the record, I love teachers — I honestly believe teaching is among the noblest of professions — and I also love countless people, men and women alike, who are government employees.

People who work in or for government, including teachers, wouldn’t be out of work without government, but just the opposite:

They’d have more and better to choose from.

Emergency medical care — open-heart surgery, renal failure, you-name-it — does not require government.

Did you know in the 19th century, they sold insurance against poverty — and it worked?

Did you know that in the 19th century, the so-called safety net was primarily private charity — like the Shriners and other lodges and organizations, religious and otherwise — and that it, too, worked well? (No, people weren’t dying in the streets for want of emergency surgeries.)

This country prospered for 140 years without a Federal Reserve or an national income tax, both of which are barely 100 years old, though now thoroughly entrenched, as is social security, medicare and medicaid, all of which are even younger.

On the subject of species extinction, which is a subject near and dear to me, I want to first note that over 99 percent of species that have ever existed on planet earth are now extinct and they went extinct before humankind was ever in the picture.

Please think about that for a long moment.

The second thing to note is that largely (though not exclusively) due to privatization and private habitat reserves and stewardship, many, many species have been pulled from the brink of extinction. Elephants, rhinos, tigers, pandas, albatross, many whale species, and countless other creatures are now flourishing. Quoting the ecologist Stuart Pimm:

“The overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent…. A number of ecologists and paleontologists believe that the claim that humans are causing a mass extinction is hyperbolic.”

And as Stewart Brand notes:

“No end of specific wildlife problems remain to be solved, but describing them too often as ‘extinction crises’ [i.e. noble cause corruption] has led to a general panic that nature is extremely fragile or already hopelessly broken. That is not remotely the case. Nature as a whole is exactly as robust as it ever was — maybe more so.”

Here’s a fantastic article on private habitat and how it protects animals.

Freedom and laissez faire promote innovation, technology, private stewardship, and human progress — in no small measure because laissez faire promotes so much economic gain.

I know no serious government-lover, even die-hard communistic-socialists, who at this point deny that laissez faire creates vastly greater wealth (they object to laissez faire for other reasons) — and on that point, it’s critical to note that as long as the capital base of a society remains low, the means of dealing with societal issues remains proportionately low.

This is an absolutely vital principle.

I ask you to never lose sight of it.

There’s a reason that America, vilified as she is by so much of the world, still gives by FAR the most foreign aid to the entire world. There’s a reason that only America can afford such trillion-dollar extravagance, year in year out, decade after decade.

John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, who founded Standard Oil, once held over 90 percent of all oil sales in the United States. This is called a non-coercive monopoly.

There’s never been a proven case of so-called Predatory Pricing — or “cutting-to-kill” — which is another anti-laissez-faire myth, another urban legend, totally false and provably so.

Standard Oil (like Walmart today) kept its prices at rock-bottom precisely because Rockefeller understood that if he jacked up his prices, competitors would come in and he’d lose his share of the market.

Only coercive monopolies — i.e. government monopolies — can fix prices.

The real point, though, is that nobody — not John D. Rockefeller, not Henry Flagler, not anybody — could have foreseen that because of laissez-faire and the innovation it fosters, the competitor who would put the biggest hit on his oil-market was not in the oil business at all.

Do you know who it was?

Thomas Edison and his lightbulb, which abolished kerosene and other oil-burning light. (Petroleum, by the way, abolished whale oil.)

It’s called creative destruction.

In a laissez-faire system, consumers, who pay their hard-earned money for the things they want, always determine the success or failure of a given idea or product or service.

If you allow people the freedom to innovate, invent, and profit from their inventions and creations, there are no limits to what will be created.

Today, Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs would perhaps not even come about because he and his staff weren’t wearing the proper government-required lab-goggles, or Thomas Edison and his employee Nikolai Tesla were in breach of labor-code for working too many consecutive hours.

Just because government currently provides it does NOT mean that without government, it won’t be provided. In fact, it’s the opposite:

Government, which by definition is an agency of force, cannot produce a SINGLE thing without first either taxing, borrowing, or printing — or all three.

Government is for this reason inherently wasteful and inefficient.

Remember also that because of entrenchment, the majority of people in this country once believed that we could never successfully privatize the mail.

Now answer this honestly:

If you must mail something which absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, whom will you most trust? The U.S. Postal Service or FedEx or UPS?

And where of those places would you rather go to wait in line?

And do you want to wait in line for urgent healthcare as you wait in line at the DMV?

I’ll close with a brief quote from a book I recently read: Enlightenment Now — by left-winger Steven Pinker:

The “population bomb” defused itself. When countries get richer and better educated, they pass through what demographers call the demographic transition. Birth rates peak and then decline, for at least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. Fertility rates have fallen most noticeably in developed regions like Europe and Japan, but they can suddenly collapse, often to demographers’ surprise, in other parts of the world. Despite the widespread belief that Muslim societies are resistant to the social changes that have transformed the West, Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.

The other environmental scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. In 2013 the Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.” Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

This idea, that environmental protection is a problem to be solved, is commonly dismissed as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us — that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity. Indeed, a naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

(Source)

Did Kristy — my main character — use public libraries? Not really. He went to bookstores, new-and-used. He preferred them. He preferred private libraries — preferred voluntarily paying a minuscule amount ($20.00 yearly, unlimited books) for a private-library card, with money he’d saved from not having to pay compulsory taxation.

March 7, 2010May 9, 2017

I, Pencil — By Leonard Read

What goes into the making of a single pencil?

In 1958, Leonard E. Read asked himself that very question — and wrote an elegant explication:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, 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.

In his piece we’re taken step-by-step through the entire process of how a single pencil is produced.

First, there are the many materials required to make a single pencil, among them: wood, rubber, paint, lacquer, graphite, metal, zinc, wax, and many other things.

We are then shown how these materials are really only the beginning of the process, for a whole industry is in turn required to produce each of those materials.

There is, for example, the lumber industry needed to produce the wood; the mining industry to mine and mill and smelt the zinc and lead and metal; the rubber industry, of course, and the paint and graphite, and so on.

Then, within each of these industries, there are numerous sub-divisions, such as chemical industries, which make up the groundwork for paint and lacquer, and the engineering companies to supply all the tools, and the shipping and transportation companies, and even the lighthouse workers to guide the ships safely into port.

Of course there is also the singular fact that our solitary pencil could neither be manufactured nor produced without all the various other forms of transportation required to get the products from place to place, and of course this transportation requires its own set of industries (not just oil), and on and on, all of which industries — and please take a moment to process this — are, in turn, no less involved than the manufacturing of the wood or graphite or rubber.

So that when everything is said and done, the making of one pencil requires thousands and thousands of people, most of whom have specialized knowledge and specialized jobs, in thousands of different industries.

Furthermore, these people come from all over the world. No centralized planning committee or commune imaginable, even with an army of super-geniuses, could organize the countless factors that go into the making of that one small pencil.

And yet in this country, as in all developed countries, pencils are so cheap and abundant that nobody thinks twice about them.

How is this so?

The answer is devilishly simple: private property and the freedom to trade that property.

The freedom to produce and trade and then reap the subsequent rewards are what bring these thousands and thousands of people, from these thousands of different industries the wide-world over, into peaceful and mutually beneficial cooperation with one another.

Think about that.

Think long and hard about it, I beseech you.

In fact, I insist you do.

Your entire understanding of human existence — whether you’re a billionaire, a bartender, or an artist, and whether you live in a cult, condo, or commune — depends upon it.

Your life depends upon it, I submit.

Think about some of the things you use in your day-to-day existence. Think about your private path of least resistance.

Think of your eyeglasses, which Galileo and Spinoza would have given their eyeteeth for.

Think of the exercise mat upon your floor. Think of the ab-roller for your core.

Think about the utensils you use to cook and clean your food, the cups you use to drink your potable water, and the faucets you use to turn that water off and on.

Think of the hoses and the sprinklers for your lawn.

Think of sponges and your soap.

Think of rope.

Think of your chocolate truffle and think of the package that it comes in.

Think of packaging again and again (and again).

Think of your clothing, no matter how fine or how shabby it may or may not be. Think of your underwear, down to the tag we do not see.

Think critically.

Think about your toothbrush and your toothpaste, and its tube. And the cap that goes on that tube.

Think of your lube.

Think about your medicine: aspirin, ibuprofin, Pepto, Lipator, antihistamines for the cough and wheeze.

Think of braces for your elbows and your knees.

Think of your transportation — bicycle, train, plane, bus, boat, automobile, jumbo jet, or even your walking shoes — and think of the sheer number of discrete parts that each of these things contain, and which you use.

Think of other technological breakthroughs.

Can you?

How about your jacket and its worn buttons, the lovely denim of faded blue, the toothpicks and the gum you chew?

Your bedding and your hygiene and your make-up.

Think of the alarm clock that every morning helps you wake up.

Think of your books and your paints and paintbrushes. Your chisel and hammer.

Your megahertz of memory if your a computer programmer.

Think of your keyboard and your mouse, your voice-recognition software.

Think of filters for your water and air.

Think about your entertainment: wine and wine bottles, dark beer. Think of all the brandy that you’ve consumed or stored.

Think of your playing cards or tarot cards or magic cards, your hoops, your chess-or-checker-board.

Think of packaging again. Think of the packages that all your things arrive in.

Think of your gardening equipment, or any other metal or wood or plastic or glass items you may use.

Think of your ball-peen hammer and your nails and your screws.

Think of your tape measures and pliers, your wrenches, your saws and your multicolored chalks.

To say nothing of your electricity — the lights, the cameras, the watches, the clocks.

Your computers and modems, MP3’s and stereos, word-processors and photo-editing software — and of course your phone, your phone, without which you’d be alone.

And televisions and lights (“More light!” said Goethe, then died) and musical instruments and medical equipment and rocket ships and edible water bottles…

Think of anything. Think of airplane models.

Look around you. Is your chair metal or wood? Does your desk or table have bolts and nails?

Notice details.

I insist, I positively insist.

Think of me as a kind of oculist.

Because I promise you — I absolutely promise — that the filthy, hardcore industry, which I believe in and love so much, the industry that went into producing, for instance, just one small component of your phone, or your bicycle, or the paperback book in your hand, or the shoes on your feet, or the glasses on your face, or the contact lenses in your eyes, or the ring in your navel, nose, or nipples, or the needles which tattooed your skin, that industry was amplified a thousandfold compared with one solitary pencil, no matter how cheap or how thin.

So please take one more look — and then look again.

Take one more look at the blue-black ink across your skin.

There’s a moral to this story and that moral is this:

Embrace technology.

Look suspiciously on the buzzword ecology.

Technology got us to this point. Only technology can get us beyond.

It is a magic wand.

There’s something profoundly paradoxical in the quest for less technology and a more simple way of life, while flying the world in jumbo jets. In fact, it’s about as paradoxical as it gets.

Celebrate, rather, human progress and specialization.

Celebrate the division of labor that technology creates, thereby freeing us all to pursue the things we most enjoy and at which we excel, since we are no longer each yoked to the task of day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month survival, but can trade freely and peacefully with those who have the things we need and want, in exchange for the things we ourselves have in turn worked to produce — being no longer condemned to a life of drudgery and tedium.

(Money is only a medium.)

Celebrate individualization.

Celebrate civilization.

Civilization is the progress toward independent, private lives, wherein we are no longer dominated by the group, gang, tribe, or community but live freely: free to associate with others as we please, or not.

This is the fundamental thing you’ve never been taught.

It’s the only thing that’s truly sustainable. It’s what you’ll never hear from any of the postmodernists, the intellectuals, the politicos, the hipsters, the academic phonies and imposters:

Celebrate human freedom and the independent mind that freedom fosters.