Back in the days of old-fashioned vinyl records — particularly the 45 RPM single records — we thought of an A-side, the main song the producers hoped would be a hit, and a B-side, hopefully another good song, but probably secondary in popularity.  This B-side gave rise to the term "flip side," which remains in our lexicon long after vinyl records were replaced by cassettes, CDs, and other media.

There have been times in the history of recorded music, to everyone's surprise, when the B-side got noticed, years later, becoming a hit in its own right, eclipsing the number it was originally intended just to support.  

Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog," the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody," and the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" are just a few examples of numbers intended to be the secondary song but eventually eclipsed their respective A-sides in popularity, when people gave them a second look.

What we are witnessing today, and have only begun to notice in recent years, is a flip side to one of the greatest economic treatises of all time — and we need to absorb this lesson as soon as possible (if it's not too late already).

In December 1958, economist Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, published a short essay in FEE's periodical, The Freeman.  In the 65 years since its introduction, this masterly work has become the most recognizable element of the Austrian School of economics.

"I, Pencil" was conceived as a fanciful anthropomorphism, the genealogy of that most common of household tools, the lead pencil.  In those few pages, Leonard Read demonstrated the magic woven by the Invisible Hand of the free market.  In the generations since, millions of us have learned to respect how countless different industries, countless people, all over the world, unknowingly come together to contribute the necessary components to make it possible for someone to manufacture a pencil (or in fact, any other product).

These farmers, chemical companies, lumber mills, miners, and metalworkers do their daily jobs, often unaware that somewhere, half a world away, someone will be using their paint, their graphite, their wood, their metal, their rubber to manufacture the millions of pencils we all depend on for school, work, crafts, and art.  It's an amazing story, brilliantly told.  It's likely that every reader of this publication could recite some lines from it by heart; it's that familiar to the modern conservative mind.

But there's a flip side, Gentle Reader, which your humble correspondent never really noticed until recently.

The story is written from a positive perspective.  There are all these industries everywhere in the world; nobody has to order any of them.  These industries exist because there's a market for their products, so as long as they make their products, those resulting pencils will be made.

The message is one of education and optimism.  We don't need five-year-plans like what the communists dream up abroad; we don't need a national industrial plan like what American Democrats propose here at home.  There will always be pencils because the free market enables it to happen.  Isn't it glorious?

In recent years, however, we have learned that the pencil — really, not just the pencil, but everything that is made with these myriad components — is in jeopardy.

The primary lesson of "I, Pencil" was that we don't need a government to mandate the manufacture of a pencil, because the market will provide it without such a mandate.  The public demand — the choice of the consumer — is an infinitely more effective mandate.

But there is secondary lesson, buried just beneath the surface: government must not meddle with all those contributing industries.  The magic of the Invisible Hand depends upon the government behaving itself.  It depends on the government leaving well enough alone.

What if the government were to ban the logging industry, so those cedar shafts were no longer available to the pencil maker?  Or what if the government were to forbid the harvesting of the rubber that we need as a binder to make the eraser?  Or what if the government decreed that the chemical industry pollutes too much, or isn't equitable or diverse enough, so it bans the manufacture of the yellow paint on the outside, or the "graphite lead" in the inside?

It turns out that government does have a role to play in the production of pencils, albeit the simplest role of all: as the Hippocratic Oath directs, "in the first place, do no harm."

That's all.  If government just leaves everything alone, there will be pencils.  Magically, almost miraculously, all these materials from all over the world will come together to provide enough pencils to satisfy demand.

But if government starts meddling, then, indeed, there will be no pencils.  If government shuts down the logging industry, for example, because of some environmental concern or philosophical overreaction, perhaps without even thinking about pencils as one of their outputs, everything dependent on wooden components will be lost.  Without lumber, there will be no pencils, no paper, no cardboard boxes, no wooden furniture.  No books or magazines, no wooden bookshelves, no wooden decks, no 2x4s for housing construction.  It's amazing how many different products, besides pencils, are dependent on just this one raw material.  The same goes for countless others.

In 1958, our fear was that foolish Western governments would copy the Soviets and the Red Chinese, issuing five-year plans to compel manufactures, gumming up the works.

In 1958, we never dreamed that our greatest risk would be the reverse.

Today, the Western economies — once called market economies; if only it were true — are shutting down industry after industry, for the most outrageous reasons.

We ban oil drilling, creating unnecessary shortages of energy and plastics.  We ban smelting and other metalworking, creating a dependence on failed third world economies or the use of substandard materials.  We ban any form of manufacturing that's labor-intensive at home, leading to the unspoken reality of furthering miserable child labor conditions abroad.

In the generations since Leonard Read wrote "I, Pencil," in fact, governments have mastered the deviant art of thoughtlessly banning whole industries "for our own good."  This has made us dependent on "foreign low-cost countries," primarily Red China, for not only finished products, but a huge percentage of the components for the products we manufacture here.

And what does this very un-market-like situation really mean in the end? 

It means that when the global supply chain is interrupted — by port strikes or railroad congestion, by COVID lockdowns or cargo ship shortages, by civil war or natural disaster — the pain is shared globally, because we have intentionally handicapped our once free market with a host of unnecessary, unnatural constraints on both supply and delivery.

The A-side message of "I, Pencil" was "Don't worry; the Invisible Hand will take care of everything."

We are now seeing the flip side of that brilliant allegory, a warning for all time: "The Invisible Hand must not be shackled and bound."  If you chain the thumb, bind the wrist, and fold down three fingers so that only the pinky is allowed to work, don't expect it to work the magic it once did.

Government must leave industry free, because we don't know — we cannot know — how interdependent we all are on every single producer, every inventor, every contributor, every material flow.

Just as no one person can make a pencil all by himself, no one bureaucrat can ever fully identify the damage that can be done by shutting down the production of the immeasurable ingredients in the global marketplace.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.