I read this essay decades ago.
It's worth reading again, when socialism seems to have a hold on young people in America. To the extent of making an avowed Marxist, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York. He's full of crazy ideas, ideas that will provably, from past experience -- that I've personally experienced in 1970s China -- be the ruination of New York.
I, Pencil, is about how freedom to make choices on where and when to buy and sell, create the best products, for the most people, at the best price.
I, Pencil My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read
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?ttps://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/read-i-pencil-my-family-tree-as-told-to-leonard-e-read-dec-1958
