OT Thread: The Invisible Hand Touched Me Where My Bathing Suit Covers Edition [WeirdDave]

So the other night I was out at the bar watching the Orioles beat the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim California. I had my i-Pad with me and was idly flipping through Craigslist. Another patron named Bob saw this and commented. Our conversation went something like this:

"What are you looking at? Oh, Craigslist. My brother uses that all the time. Crazy, he should get a job"

"What does he do"

"Oh, he buys phones and stuff like that, jailbreaks them, then sells them for a lot more. He'll buy a phone for $150 and sell it for $400."

"Sounds like he's doing pretty well"

"I suppose, but he's always driving all over to buy stuff"

"Ok. How long do you suppose it takes him to pick one up and get home? Hour and a half? How long to jailbreak it? Lets say 30 minutes, although I bet it a lot less if he has the machine or program or whatever you use. You just told me he made $250 bucks on that one phone he sold. Dude, that's $125/hour! That's a pretty good income. That's the how the free market works. People buy stuff they can sell to make money."

"I sold an old car to Crazy Rays (Crazy Rays is a pick n pull junkyard) for $500. I bet they sold 2-3 grand worth of parts off of it."

"How much work would it have been for you to part it out and sell the parts yourself?"

"Too much"

"And you'd rather have the $500 than your old beater, right?"

"Damn straight"

"See, that's the beauty of the free market! Nobody loses!"

"What do you mean"

"Look, they don't teach this in school anymore, but think about it for a sec. You hear all this crap about evil corporations and price gouging and that kind of shit. In a free market, that's all crap. Nobody voluntarily makes a deal that's bad for them.. You'd rather have the $500 than your old car. Win. Crazy Rays would rather have your old car than the $500. Win. Who loses?"

"Nobody"

"Who wins?"

"Both of us"

"And that's why the free market works."

*clink beers *

Now, I don't even think about this stuff it's so ingrained. You probably don't either, but as I said to Bob, they DON'T teach this in school anymore and in fact they teach the opposite-business is greedy, capitalism is unfair, etc.. The media repeats the themes over and over. Lots of people who don't stop to consider the full ramifications of everything have at least a subconscious bias against the very principles that make their lives so comfortable. All of us should be alert for opportunities to actually explain in simple language how our country is supposed to work. I wasn't preachy, I didn't lecture, it was just two guys jawing over beers. Bob actually laughed when we were finished, and I could tell he was thinking "Son of a bitch. That's so simple!". It is simple. And it works. One you think about it, it's blindingly obvious because all of us live it every day. I always have an eye open for opportunities like that to pull a little wool away from someone's eyes. You should too. Christians were a small, minority sect in a vast Roman empire, but one person at a time they converted the whole thing. Conservatives aren't a minority, but committed ones who understand the principles are, and a lot of people don't realize they actually have conservative values. Keep an eye out for the chance to make them realize it.

Here endeth the lesson.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:30 AM

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