Essay question:

Consider Leonard Read's famous 1958 essay, I, Pencil:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—-no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—-if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—-well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Next consider Jeffrey Riggenbach's biographical essay, Henry David Thoreau: Founding Father of American Libertarian Thought, July 2010:

But this is not to say that [Thoreau] had no practical skills. Actually, he was a man of many skills. Not only could he teach school and make pencils and tutor children and garden and serve as a literary man's assistant, he could do all sorts of other work as well. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it in his 1880 essay on Thoreau, "there were few things that he could not do. He could make a house, a boat … or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar," and "he could do most things with unusual perfection."

Write an essay that addresses these two conflicting claims.

Hint: consider making use of the talk, "When Ideas Have Sex," by Matt Ridley, July 2010.