Opus 2021-092: It Is Just a Cup of Coffee

One of the frequent trains of thought I have in my morning worship involves the amazement I feel at all the people that have gone into me enjoying a simple cup of coffee in the morning.  I think about the Juan Valdez’s picking the beans and my trail moves all the way to electrician who installed the wires for my coffee maker.  It is amazing how many people around the world are involved in the simple pleasures of life.

As I was looking through my notes on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations I came across him expressing this same idea.

“The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country? How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world? What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen!”  Wealth of Nations, Project Gutenberg, Kindle location 222-28

The thought of a government committee trying to arrange everything that goes on in my life fills me with panic.  The free market works because millions of people making decisions can not be duplicated in a government think tank.

Long live free enterprise.  Down with government controls.

homo unius libri