As the driving force behind the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), “the granddaddy of libertarian think tanks,” Leonard Read faced decades of “what would markets do to solve this problem” challenges when pointing out any of the many inadequacies of government’s coercive organization of society. Since those challenges still haunt believers in liberty, it is worth considering his answer, which runs from what we don’t know to what we do. And his justifiably famous “I, Pencil,” is right in the middle of things.

The beginning of Read’s answer came in “I Don’t Know,” in his The Free Market and Its Enemy (1965), which deals with how to successfully advocate for “the free market and its miraculous performances” in the face of such challenges:

Skeptics of the free market are forever asking, “Well, how would the free market attend to mail delivery? Education? Or, whatever?”

[Unfortunately] a person can no more explain how the free market would attend to mail delivery than his great-grandfather could have explained how television could ever emerge from free market forces!

Answer honestly: I don’t know; I never will know; no one will ever know.

In other words, Read recognized that the attempt to answer the inherently unanswerable was futile. But there was a better way, using what is, in fact, knowable. And that is where “I, pencil,” which reveals the large number of market miracles that go into even something as simple as a pencil, comes in: //

However, the innumerable market miracles all around us, none of which any of us could have correctly predicted in advance, provide us with overwhelming proof of the power of liberty. Free men and women can do not only great but unimaginable things when they own themselves and can make whatever peaceful arrangements they voluntarily choose.

There is also a useful contrast between freedom, challenged to prove itself in advance before many will even consider it, and government, unable to prove itself in action despite the power to force us to follow its lead. No government representative or bureaucrat can meet the burden of proof demanded of freedom.

And unlike defenders of self-ownership and the market behavior that arises from it, which has produced uncountable successes without theft, there is no massive list of dramatic life-improving “success stories” created by government. But that is unsurprising. As Read put it, “How can frustration be manipulated into harmony and increased production? Can any interference with peaceful, willing exchange, regardless of who does the interfering, do other than wreak havoc?”