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I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. The burden of the article is how diffuse are the inputs to make a simple item like a pencil. Of course a particular company - Eberhard Faber, in the example instance - made the pencil. But Mr. Eberhard and Mr. Faber did not simply speak the pencil into existence; the company has to have buildings housing machinery, and workers to operate the machines. But beyond that, the Eberhard Faber workers have to have food, shelter, and normal amenities - including those required by their families.
And the same is true of the vendors who supply Eberhard Faber with the machinery they require, and all the obvious materials - wood, graphite, rubber, and the ferrule material and the enamel. All those vendors have their own equipment, workers, and supply chain. And in all cases the workers need food, shelter, and normal amenities. So although the pencil certainly does not exist without Eberhard Faber, society works together to make the pencil. And everything else.
The correct word for all the support which surrounds the total production of the pencil - or anything else - is society. Not government, note well, society Back in the day, a Civics teacher gave a homework assignment intended to teach - as the teacher smugly said the next day - that “society” meant nothing other than “government.” At the time, I did not accept the teacher’s notion, but I did not then know that the very start of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense puts paid to that idea:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . .
Thus we can see that although Elizabeth Warren is in a very real sense right that “you didn’t build that . . . somebody else made that happen,” that is not to the credit of the government. Society - including Eberhard Faber particularly - makes the pencil. The socialist merely criticizes “the man who is actually in the arena - and appropriates the credit due to others, who worked to a bottom line while the critics second-guessed.