"I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read", commonly known as "I, Pencil", is an essay by Leonard Read and it was first published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman . [1]
"I, Pencil" is written in the first person from the point of view of a pencil. The pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port.
No Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the invisible hand at work.
... Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
... The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
— "I, Pencil", 2008 edition
It was reprinted in The Freeman in May 1996 and as a pamphlet entitled "I... Pencil" in May 1998. In the reprint, Milton Friedman wrote the introduction and Donald J. Boudreaux wrote the afterword. [2] Friedman used the essay in his 1980 PBS television show Free to Choose [3] and the accompanying book of the same name. [4] In the 2008 50th Anniversary Edition, the introduction is written by Lawrence W. Reed and Friedman wrote the afterword. [5]
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e e cummings or E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. During World War I, he worked as an ambulance driver and was imprisoned in an internment camp, which provided the basis for his novel The Enormous Room in 1922. The following year he published his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, which showed his early experiments with grammar and typography. He wrote four plays; HIM (1927) and Santa Claus: A Morality (1946) were most successful. He wrote EIMI (1933), a travelog of the Soviet Union, and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in poetry, published as i—six nonlectures (1953). Fairy Tales (1965), a collection of short stories, was published posthumously.
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement is a 1980 book by economists Milton and Rose D. Friedman, accompanied by a ten-part series broadcast on public television, that advocates free market principles. It was primarily a response to an earlier landmark book and television series The Age of Uncertainty, by the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas Jr.
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books with minor revisions throughout. It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. The poem concerns the biblical story of the fall of man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
The "Miracle of Chile" was a term used by economist Milton Friedman to describe the reorientation of the Chilean economy in the 1980s and the effects of the economic policies applied by a large group of Chilean economists who collectively came to be known as the Chicago Boys, having studied at the University of Chicago where Friedman taught. He said the "Chilean economy did very well, but more importantly, in the end the central government, the military junta, was replaced by a democratic society. So the really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society." The junta to which Friedman refers was a military government that came to power in a 1973 coup d'état, which came to an end in 1990 after a democratic 1988 plebiscite removed Augusto Pinochet from the presidency.
Henry Stuart Hazlitt was an American journalist who wrote about business and economics for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
Economic freedom, or economic liberty, refers to the agency of people to make economic decisions. This is a term used in economic and policy debates as well as in the philosophy of economics. One approach to economic freedom comes from the liberal tradition emphasizing free markets, free trade, and private property. Another approach to economic freedom extends the welfare economics study of individual choice, with greater economic freedom coming from a larger set of possible choices. Other conceptions of economic freedom include freedom from want and the freedom to engage in collective bargaining.
Leonard Edward Read was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), one of the first free market think tanks in the United States. He wrote 29 books and numerous essays, including "I, Pencil" (1958).
The Freeman was an American libertarian magazine, formerly published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). It was founded in 1950 by John Chamberlain, Henry Hazlitt, and Suzanne La Follette. The magazine was purchased by a FEE-owned company in 1954, and FEE took over direct control of the magazine in 1956.
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is an American conservative, libertarian economic think tank. Founded in 1946 in New York City, FEE is now headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a member of the State Policy Network.
Armen Albert Alchian was an American economist who made major contributions to microeconomic theory and the theory of the firm. He spent almost his entire career at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is credited with turning its economics department into one of the country's best. He is also known as one of the founders of new institutional economics, and widely acknowledged for his work on property rights.
Capitalism and Freedom is a book by Milton Friedman originally published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press which discusses the role of economic capitalism in liberal society. It has sold more than half a million copies since 1962 and has been translated into eighteen languages.
My Name Is Barbra is the first of two studio album tie-ins by Barbra Streisand for her debut television special of the same name, which aired April 28, 1965, on CBS-TV. Boosted by the critical acclaim for the broadcast, the album was certified gold and peaked at #2 on the US charts; by 1966, the album sold over one million copies worldwide.
Milton Friedman's book Essays in Positive Economics (1953) is a collection of earlier articles by the author with as its lead an original essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics." This essay posits Friedman's famous, but controversial, principle that assumptions need not be "realistic" to serve as scientific hypotheses; they merely need to make significant predictions.
The following is a list of works by the prominent American economist Milton Friedman.
The Very Best of Tracy Lawrence is a 2007 compilation album by country music artist Tracy Lawrence. It is his third greatest-hits album. This compilation comprises 21 of his top ten singles, arranged in chronological order, from his 1991 debut "Sticks and Stones" to 2003's "Paint Me a Birmingham". Of the songs on this album, only the 1994 single "Renegades, Rebels and Rogues" was not previously included on one of Lawrence's studio releases. The album has sold 348,900 copies in the United States as of April 2017.
Economic liberalism is a political and economic ideology that supports a market economy based on individualism and private property in the means of production. Adam Smith is considered one of the primary initial writers on economic liberalism, and his writing is generally regarded as representing the economic expression of 19th-century liberalism up until the Great Depression and rise of Keynesianism in the 20th century. Historically, economic liberalism arose in response to feudalism and mercantilism.
Floyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper was an American academic, economist and writer who was best known for founding the Institute for Humane Studies in 1961.
Benjamin A. Rogge was an American economist, college administrator, and libertarian writer, speaker and foundation advisor. Rogge received an A.B. degree from Hastings College and an M.A. from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Rogge received his PhD in economics from Northwestern. At Wabash College, Rogge taught in the summer Institute for Professional Development, in addition to his usual teaching in economics. Rogge co-authored an economics principles textbook with John Van Sickle. One strength of the text is the account that it gives of Joseph Schumpeter's process of creative destruction. Rogge helped organize a series of lectures by Milton Friedman at Wabash that were eventually developed into Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom book. Much later, Rogge participated in a brainstorming session for Friedman's Free to Choose television series. Liberty Fund was founded with money from Pierre Goodrich, who sought advice from Rogge during the Fund's early years. Rogge served for many years as a Liberty Fund trustee. Thomas Sowell gives Rogge credit for encouraging him to write a book on economics and race. Rogge also was a frequent presenter at the seminars of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). FEE's founder, Leonard Read, thought of Rogge as Read's eventual successor, an outcome prevented by Read outliving Rogge. An extended video clip of a Rogge FEE lecture on "Competition and Monopoly" on YouTube illustrates the dry wit that made him a popular speaker. Rogge attended 13 meetings of the influential international Mont Pelerin Society. Rogge helped produce, and narrated, a documentary on Adam Smith that was funded by Liberty Fund. Rogge wrote the introduction to a collection of quotations from Adam Smith. A collection of Rogge's speeches, often on topics in economics or education, was published under the title Can Capitalism Survive? Wabash College, where he taught for many years, named a lounge on the first floor of their academic building housing the economics department the Rogge Lounge in his honor. In addition, Wabash established and named a speaker series after Rogge to pay homage to his many contributions to university students and free market economics. Rogge's archives are mainly housed at the Hoover Institute on the campus of Stanford University. A posthumous collection of Rogge's speeches and essays has appeared under the title A Maverick's Defense of Freedom.
Thomas Skinner is an American television and film executive. Skinner has received four Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, and a Dupont/Columbia award. He is known for his work in public television as Executive Producer of National Geographic Specials and other programming for PBS and WQED in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Free to Choose Network.