CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Joe Biden Invoked ‘I, Pencil’ To Explain Supply Chains, but He Seems To Have Missed the Point:

“Products like smartphones often bring together parts from France, Italy, chips from the Netherlands, touchscreens from New York state, camera components from Japan,” the president continued, before acknowledging that “global supply chains have helped dramatically bring down the price we pay for the things we buy.”

Yes, yes, yes, exactly right.

But—and you knew there had to be a “but” coming—it took Biden less than five minutes to toss all that aside and begin promoting his “Buy American” agenda. That “won’t just be a promise but an ironclad reality,” he promised.

What happened to the wood from Brazil and the graphite from India being used to make pencils here, one might wonder.

The simplicity of the pencil-making metaphor destroys the performative politics of Biden’s “Buy American” rules, which will accomplish little besides forcing taxpayers to pay higher prices for just about everything the government purchases. Those rules also mean that Biden’s just-passed $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan—Wednesday’s speech was a victory lap moment for the president—will be less significant than it otherwise would be.

And it means that Biden didn’t really digest the meaning of “I, Pencil.”

The lesson Read offers in the essay’s final paragraph is thus: “Leave all creative energies uninhibited…let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows to freely flow.”

Notice that there is nothing in there about how you should stop the free-flowing of creative energy if less than 50 percent of it was manufactured in the United States. There’s also nothing about import quotas or tariffs. Maybe next time Biden’s speechwriters will read all the way to the end.

Related: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.