A lovely little bit of explanation (that doesn’t require you to already have Econ 101 on your transcript):
“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*
