RALEIGH – I am such a man.
In the past 48 hours, I have single-handedly assembled a new attachment for my lawn tractor and installed a new faucet in my kitchen sink. In these two bold, masculine strokes, I accomplished several important tasks. I made use of a number of lonely tools hiding in the corners of my garage. I avoided the expense and inconvenience of calling in a professional. And I demonstrated my manly prowess over the forces of corrosion, chaos, and chrome.
Of course, that’s just my perspective. Someone with a bit more objectivity might describe my excursions into handymanery with more accurate language. She might point out that the tractor attachment that was supposed to take about a half-hour to assemble actually took an hour an a half, and that another hour into the tractor’s first mow the bagger’s handle fell off. Regarding the kitchen sink, she might observe that the “expense and inconvenience of calling a professional” might have resulted in a workman who actually knew how to install a faucet, rather than someone who, armed with a flashlight and a rather dubious-looking set of pliers, disappeared for an hour underneath the sink with a frustrated pledge to “find something to twist.”
As I said, I’m a man. What, am I supposed to ask for directions?
Well, at this point my lawn is mowed and leaf-less and my kitchen sink runs with no obvious leaks. There’s no telling what tomorrow will bring, however, which brings me to the subject of Leonard Read. He is the late founder and president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), one of the leaders of the free-market renaissance in the United States during the mid-20th century. FEE is still around, still doing important work in educating people around the world about freedom and publishing a monthly journal called The Freeman (for which our own George Leef serves as book review editor and to which many Carolina Journal writers have contributed over the years).
I’m thinking of Read because of what I and many others consider to be his best piece of writing: a deceptively simple yet brilliantly illustrative essay he published in 1958 entitled “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard Read.” The great economist Milton Friedman, who used Read’s story about the pencil in his famous television program Free to Choose, wrote that he knew of “no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand … and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information.”
The gist of Read’s story is that no more how intelligent, well-educated, and skilled the person, it is certain that he or she does not know how to make something as simple as a pencil. Its constituent parts – wood, lacquer, rubber, graphite – are shipped in from around the globe and require entirely dissimilar manufacturing processes to be useful. No one person knows how to do it all. Nor is there any particular person who ensures that it is all harvested, mined, shipped, shaped, pressed, rolled, steamed, glued, boxed, delivered, sold, and opened. Yet somehow, all of these events happen in the proper sequence, when needed, over and over again.
Modernity has increased the extent to which we as individuals are divorced from the knowledge and skills necessary to generate the goods and services we use every day. Few of us grow all our own food, make our own clothes, build our own homes, or transport ourselves without complex machinery. Nor should we. The genius of a market economy is that we live happier, healthier, and longer lives to the extent that we specialize in what we know best and trade with those who know how to do other things better.
So there’s nothing at all wrong with the fact that I’m an incompetent handyman. Of course, offering such an excuse is just part for the course – I’m a man, after all.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.