- someone has to ensure that the factory is cited for not having sufficiently wide egress doors
- someone has to ensure that the factory and its suppliers have Affirmative Action Plans on file with the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, with appropriate goals and timetables for placement of Non-Asian Minorities in leadership positions, employment in general, and in contractor selection
- someone has to ensure that the pencil and its packaging contains appropriate warning labels and consumer information
- someone has to monitor the factory and its parent corporation for potential collusion with competitors on pricing and geographic distribution, i.e. Sherman Act violations
- someone has to ensure that appropriate calorie counts are included in pencil packaging, in case someone chews on the pencil shaft or the eraser
- someone has to monitor the manufacturer for suspicious staging of bank deposits, as well as ensuring that the bank Knows Its Customer
First of all, you have to grease the local politicians for the sudden zoning problems that always come up.
Then there's the kickbacks to the carpenters.
And if you plan on using any cement in this building I'm sure the teamsters would like to have a little chat with you, and that'll cost you.
Don't forget a little something for the building inspectors.
There's the long-term costs, such as waste disposal. I don't know if you're familiar with who runs that business but I assure you it's not the boy scouts.
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read.The burden of the article is that Eberhard Faber® doesn’t make a pencil by itself - by the time you figure in the people who work for Eberhad Faber, the machinery they operate to do so, which must be maintained and replaced as it wears out, the suppliers of the component parts of the pencil, their employees and their machinery, and the supply train which is required for the people who work for Farber and its suppliers, society makes the pencil, not Eberhard Faber alone.
Note well, I said “society.” I did not say, nor did I intend to imply, government. The critique proposed here, that the enforcement of rules by government is taken for granted, is actually a direct challenge to not only I, Pencil but to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.All socialists prefer to use “society” as a euphemism for government - and they should be confronted directly on any occasion when they try to get away with it. Government has no expertise in the making of pencils, nor in the supplying of the inputs, direct or indirect, to the process. All government can do is negatively punish those who claim credit for contributions to society which they have no legitimate claim to. It is not the businessman but the “liberal” who deserves to be told, “You didn’t build that."Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.