The following is inspired by the essay, “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read (popularized by Milton Friedman). Read and Friedman used this analogy to demonstrate the complexity of supply chains and the free market to show how even a simple pencil takes countless people, processes, and skill to make. These ideas remain relevant today as the free market faces tariffs and excessive regulation in various industries, including the building industry, used here as a modern application of this timeless lesson.
I am a house. Not a mansion or an apartment, just a simple, single-family house. Providing shelter, comfort, and safety is my vocation. Now, on the surface, my genealogy may seem quite simple: wood, drywall, nails, and paint. However, dig a bit deeper and you will come to realize that no lone person can build I, House, nor can anyone trace the vast and intricate web that produced my many parts.
My story begins with a skilled draftsman holding a pencil, sketching the grand plan that becomes I, House. But even this pencil has a lineage that no single human can account for. The forests for the wood, the graphite mines, the metal for the fastenings all requiring many hands, skill, and tools. But I am not here to explain the miracle of the pencil, which has been explained before. I am here to tell the seemingly ordinary story of me.
Consider my frame, sourced from the trees of sprawling Canadian forests. These trees are meticulously cut down by trained specialists using skill and machinery — machinery that often consists of steel refined in China inside blast furnaces and through the diligent workmanship of engineers and welders.
This steel must make its way through oceans on cargo ships, which themselves must be maintained by a crew of various professions. Once it arrives, the steel must be driven across the country to factories by a truck fueled by gasoline — which is sourced, refined, and delivered through an equally complex network of gas fields, machinery, and expertise. All the electricity, manpower, skill, and resourcefulness required to maintain a factory of that sort cannot be overstated. However, time would be insufficient to explore the many facets of a single factory.
The mills, saw rigs, optical sensors, chippers, drying, seasoning, planing, grading, and banding necessary to make lumber requires specific materials, skills, and processes to complete. And that’s just for the wood!
The journey continues with drywall, which consists of gypsum rock often sourced from Spain. It must be mined using ammonium nitrate as an explosive and processed using equipment, such as the double shaft mixer, compaction press machines, the vertical dryer, and an induced draft fan. That equipment consists of detailed pieces that must be sourced, assembled, and delivered to such factories. And those factories must be staffed, heated and cooled, cleaned, and managed.
Once the raw gypsum is processed, it is sandwiched between recycled newspapers. For the recycled newspapers to end up at that factory, it must first be collected, sorted, shredded, pulped, de-inked, and formed into sheets — a process that once again requires machinery with detailed pieces, all of which need to be sourced and delivered, a trained staff, and a maintained factory.
When the meticulous work of creating drywall is finished, it still must be delivered to a wholesaler, precisely stacked, and diligently marketed to be sold. Once sold, this notoriously heavy drywall must be delivered by a truck driver and hung by a construction crew.
I could continue to describe the various parts and processes that go into I, House, but there would not be enough pages in the world. For I have not mentioned my copper wiring, my concrete foundation, the ceramic in my tile, the insulation in my attic, or the screws that hold me together. Each of these materials has a genealogy so vast that no historian, economist, or bureaucrat could ever fully comprehend them.
And when I, House, am fully complete, still I am not truly done. I require inspectors, appraisers, cleaning crews, real estate agents, loan officers, and landscapers. All people with different training and tools that are a part of the great collaboration that brings me into completion and prepares me for life with a family.
So, who organizes all of this? Who determines how many studs, headers, or shingles need to be made? Who decides how much steel should go to machinery to make parts, nails, rebar, or fastenings? Who could assign how much gypsum should go into drywall or cement production?
No one. And everyone.
It is not the work of a central planner or a construction czar. It is the Invisible Hand of the free market: a vast network of individual decisions, freely made. It is the miracle of spontaneous order, born of cooperation without coercion. The chaotic beauty of a free people creating something that no single mind could conceive.
This is why efforts to centrally regulate any sector — whether through quotas, tariffs, or excessive regulation — do not merely distort one industry, but every industry. When steel is tariffed, the price of steel rises. But so does the price of nails, rebar, cars, soup cans, and MRI machines. When the supply of building materials is disproportionately taxed, homebuyers will inevitably be forced to pay more for I, House.
Not only do regulations and taxes on construction materials impact my price, but so do restrictive zoning laws and excessive building fees. These constraints limit the supply of homes like me, even when usable land is available. High fees are ultimately passed on to buyers, further increasing the price tag of a home like I, House.
In the 20th century, many nations, influenced by big-government philosophies like Marxism, thought they could understand the complexity of creating me and other products. They thought they could simply command and control our creation. But these “command economies” failed because the processes that create us are just too complex for any bureaucrat or committee to fully grasp.
I am proof of what the free market can do. I demonstrate what value, beauty, and stability can emerge from voluntary exchange and decentralized cooperation. Take a lesson from I, House. If this humble frame can emerge from the chaotic freedom of millions working in harmony, imagine what else is possible with a free people.