LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The difference between the thousands, if not millions, of dollars in materials and labor that it would cost you to make a pencil and the fact that a pencil costs 19 cents – that’s the real meaning of trade. “
daughter’s hair plenty of times. I’ll give it a try for practice. The power cord is coated with plastic. You can make plastic at home on the stovetop using common household materials. (I Googled it.) The laptop has a socket, I’ll stick one of the Williams-Sonoma stuff in there. And a power brick is just a plug, right? I’ll stick the other end into the baseboard outlet... The number of people it takes to make my laptop power cord is not what convinces me of the real meaning of trade. What convinces me is the number of people it takes to find my laptop power cord – which is everybody . I’ve got the whole house and the entire office looking for it. And considering the way everybody is feeling about me at the moment... My wife is furious because I ruined her favorite omelet pan. My daughter went to school looking like Rapunzel had hired a hairdresser on crack. When I searched the web for “home-made plastic” I misspelled it and Homeland Security thinks I was trying to make plastique explosives and now I’m on a terrorist watch list. The cleaning lady wants to kill me because of the mess in the kitchen. (Turns out making plastic on the stovetop can cause explosions too.) And my co-workers, due perhaps to all the ceiling sprinklers going off after I started the electrical fire... Therefore, I’m about to go out and personally engage in trade. I need to buy a new laptop power cord. $32.95! Geez! And all that money going straight to China! No wonder it’s “International Trade” that gets all the headlines.
back to being a miner to get the ore to make the metal for the thingy that holds the eraser and build a smelter, a rolling plant, and a machine-tool factory to produce equipment to crimp the thingy in place. You’d also have to grow a rubber tree in your backyard. And a pencil sells for 19 cents. The difference between the thousands, if not millions, of dollars in materials and labor that it would cost you to make a pencil and the fact that a pencil costs 19 cents – that’s the real meaning of trade. (Copies of I, Pencil are still available from F.E.E. for $4.95 – a perfect gift for any economic ignoramus you happen to know.) My own example of “trade truth” would be the power cord for my laptop. This dumb and droopy little contraption presents only a few of the manufacturing problems entailed in pins and pencils. The wire core is copper, but I should be able to smack some Williams- Sonoma cookware into what’s needed using tin snips and a claw hammer. The copper wire is braided. I’ve watched my wife braid my
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January 2019
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