Nine years ago, I shared a video featuring a poetic explanation of bread and the free market’s “invisible hand.”

Now, for Part II, we have another poetic explanation, in this case about pineapples.

The message is the same in both videos. Simply stated, unfettered markets do an amazing job of delivering affordable goods and services to the masses.

Which is what Joseph Schumpeter pointed out back in 1942.

All that is needed is to give the private sector some “breathing room.”

For those who prefer reading instead of watching, Leonard Read’s 1958 essay on the seemingly simple pencil is a masterpiece.

Here’s a small sampling.

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe… I have a profound lesson to teach. …not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. …Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. …There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum. …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. …I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. …an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

Our friends on the left, however, don’t like the invisible hand.

In the extreme case, they want to replace free markets with central planning.

Since that approach has a track record of utter failure, leftists now are more likely to push for ad hoc interventionism. Somewhere on my 2019 Industrial Policy Spectrum.

Sadly, the United States is not in the best category (Laissez-Faire). That’s the bad news.

The worst news is that I fear we are slowly moving left, both in terms of ideology in Washington and on my spectrum.

I’ve been pointing out that nations such as Germany and the United Kingdom need their own versions of Javier Milei. Well, so does the United States.

P.S. The guy in the video, Dominic Frisby, is also the creator of the libertarian national anthem. I also highly recommend his 2019 and 2020 videos about Brexit.