I, Sharpie

Summary

Note: This essay’s framing is drawn from Leonard E. Read’s famous 1958 essay, “I, Pencil,” which attempts to show that spontaneous market forces are responsible for all productive activity. The recent Wall Street Journal story, “Sharpie Found a Way to Make Pens More Cheaply—By Manufacturing Them in the U.S.,” provides a set of facts that confounds Read’s narrative and depicts more accurately how production happens in the real economy.I am a Sharpie pen—the permanent marker familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write, or who become president and get to sign bills and letters and mark things up.Writing things and marking things up is all I do.You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting: from America, to China, and back again. My company moved most of my manufacturing over to China in the early 2000s to cut costs. A lot of companies did that after the United States granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China. We made it easy for companies to move production out of America, in hopes that this would turn China into a liberal democracy, or create new jobs for Americans selling other things to China, or something. It didn’t make much sense to me but, then, I’m just a marker.I had a pencil friend once, he tried to explain it all to me as the miraculous workings of an “Invisible Hand.” He attributed his existence to “millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding.” He even made the rather peculiar claim that “since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me.” That seemed strange to me, because I’m pretty sure he was made by the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania back in the 1950s. They seemed to do a good job of it. But then again, the people who owned the company sold it to some other people in Germany, who then sold it to some other people, and th...