Why do some politicians and bureaucrats constantly forget that bad things happen when governments interfere in our largely free market?

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her biggest speech yet, but even some of her supporters say she botched it by pushing for food price controls to “fix” inflation.

The concept she advocates is quite simple.

It is the great conceit that government central planners can prevent inflation—which is caused by reckless spending and massive expansion of the money supply by governments—by, for example, forcing grocery stores to set their prices at government-determined levels.

But such central planning never works. The main reason is that no one except God is smart enough to make such incredibly complex decisions about an incredibly complex food supply chain that involves millions of incredibly complex actions.

In 1958, Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil” beautifully explained the complexity of markets and why the hubris of government central planners can only make things worse.

As he showed, the production of something seemingly as simple as a No. 2 pencil is an incredibly complex, collaborative and global process involving thousands of people who do not know each other.

It begins with a cedar tree being cut down and workers using ropes and equipment to pull it onto a truck or railroad car.

Countless people and skilled workers are involved in mining ore to produce steel and processing it into saws, axes and engines, writes Read.

The logs are transported to a sawmill and cut into slats. The slats are kiln dried, tinted, waxed and then kiln dried again.

Read wondered how many skills were needed to make the paint and the kilns. What about the electrical power? And the belts, motors and other parts of the mill?

The cedar slats are then delivered to a pencil factory.

A complex machine cuts grooves into each slat. Then another machine places graphite into every other slat. Glue is applied.

Two slats – one with graphite, one without – are sealed together and then cut to pencil length. Each pencil receives six layers of lacquer. In complex processes, thousands of workers are employed to produce graphite and lacquer.

The brass holder of each eraser is another wonder.

First, miners in countries like Peru extract zinc and copper and ship them. Experts process these raw materials into brass sheet, which is cut, punched and attached to the pencil.

The eraser, Read wrote, was made of “factice,” a rubbery material produced by reacting rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with sulfur chloride.

There is no doubt that an incredible amount of work goes into making a simple pencil, with millions of strangers working together to create its components, bringing their unique trades and skills to the table.

What is even more astonishing, however, is that no single person is able to control this process.

Although there is no mastermind or central planner in government, billions of pencils are produced every year with such monotonous efficiency that we take pencils for granted.

History clearly shows that governments have failed to impose price controls in complex markets.

They didn’t work when President Nixon tried them in the 1970s, and they haven’t worked anywhere else either – unless you believe that Cuba is now a paradise and once-rich Venezuela is doing well under socialist central planning.

The humble pencil, Read explained, is a triumph of human freedom—of creative energies responding spontaneously to need and desire.

It is alarming that we have a presidential candidate who appears to neither understand nor appreciate this simple economic truth.

Tom Purcell’s column is distributed by the newspaper syndicate Cagle Cartoons.