The magic of markets and spontaneous order explained in three minutes!
Dominic Frisby updates Leonard Read’s essay I, Pencil for the modern age! The magic of markets and spontaneous order explained in three minutes! Hat tip to Robert Mish for bringing this to my attention! Original:
Transcript
In my local shop today I bought a fresh pineapple. £1.50 did I pay, then looked upon the label. It said origin Costa Rica, I exclaimed: “Well, Costa Rica’s far away, 5,000 miles or more.”
I pondered all that had to pass, what had gone before, to get that fruit into my tum in London SE4.
Someone had to till the soil, get on their hands and knees, and plant the crowns one foot apart in rows in rainy season. Pineapples need two years to grow, so considerable curating, fertilizing, pest control, draining, irrigating. Then with desired ripeness reached, the time has come for harvest. Machete work in boiling sun—some say that part’s the hardest.
Now they must be cleaned and sorted, trucked to ports to cross the seas, loaded onto huge great ships and chilled to 10 degrees. And who indeed did build these ships, these feats of engineering might? Weigh 200,000 tons—thank God for power steering.
Across the ocean they do go, then unloaded and inspected, dispatched to depots then your shop, and stacked on shelves to be selected. Pineapple for your cocktail, your juice or sponge cake treats, or in your sweet and sour pork... but never on a pizza!
All that labor, risk and more, yours for £1.50. And no one’s forcing you to buy it—don’t if you’re feeling thrifty. If you should win at Wimbledon, the trophy has a finial—the most wanted prize in tennis is a silver pineapple. For once pineapples were so dear they were a status symbol; now they are so plentiful we think it’s very simple.
No one could have planned all this—that’s not possible to contrive. At work here was a greater force than anyone alive, stronger than the mightiest army ever known to man, the greatest power in history: the invisible hand.
Everyone did what they did to make a bit of money. Self-interest was the driving force, personal gain. Now, dummies tend to think, I’ve seen, that trade is zero sum, but in this game of markets, everybody won. At every step along the way, someone made a profit—not as much as they would like, we can’t all be Warren Buffett. But workers got their wages, farmers got their rent to boot, transporters got their costs and more, and I got cheap fresh fruit.
This instinct never fades away, no matter how they tax and plan. This drive to make life better is what maketh man. No government could achieve all this with economic targets. How grateful yes we all should be for the miracle of markets.
