I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read

The Great Depression was sparked by a sudden collapse of prices on the US stock market in 1929, leading to mass unemployment and poverty that persisted throughout the ensuing decade in much of the world. The crash undermined faith in capitalism, boosting support for the idea that governments can and should control economic decision-making to protect society from the volatility of markets. This idea inspired President Roosevelt’s New Deal, under which the executive branch created new agencies to directly employ the jobless in large public-works projects. Congress enacted laws to regulate banks, protect workers from exploitation, and establish a social safety-net. New Deal programs were extremely popular among the general public, and many economists at the time and since have credited them with jump-starting America’s economic recovery.

Leonard Read was among the conservative critics who believed the New Deal may have actually prolonged the Great Depression by expanding government bureaucracy and infringing upon private enterprise. Ultimately, massive military spending during World War II provided the stimulus needed to end the Great Depression, and the question of whether the New Deal’s role was positive or negative remains unresolved.

After the war, America’s former ally the Soviet Union became its chief enemy in a decades-long ideological and geopolitical conflict known as the “Cold War,” in which the two global superpowers each sought to demonstrate the superiority of their economic system. At the same time, they fought “proxy wars” in developing countries of the Global South to enforce respective spheres of influence. During the 1950s, conservatives like Read feared that increasing government interventionism in the US would eventually morph into central planning of the sort practiced since the 1930s in the Soviet Union, where government agencies comprehensively directed the production of all goods and services on the basis of “five-year plans.” The state planning agency controlled the production of every pencil factory in the country, dictating how many pencils to produce each year, from where to source their raw materials and machinery, and where to ship the finished products. The agency set the price at which every store must sell the pencils. Soviet central planning, also known as a “command economy,” proved to be disastrously inefficient, resulting in weak growth and endless shortages of basic consumer goods. This stagnation ultimately led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.