The Forgotten Means

During primarily high school, but also a bit in middle school, I was really into reselling. I didn’t like the idea of having to work a typical, rigid, and rather low-wage job that many of my other peers were working. So consequently, I wanted to be my own boss with my own rules.

It started with reselling candy and chips out of my locker in 6th grade. Then during 8th and 9th grade I changed to Funko Pops, GPUs, PS5s, shoes, and a variety of other collectibles. Eventually I got bored with that and switched to NFT trading, by far my most profitable venture. I finally “ended” (who knows if I will pick something else up!) my reselling career with vintage clothes.

All of these ventures resulted in me catching flak about something or another (like two counseling office visits in middle school for the candy reselling), but I especially was criticized for clothing reselling.

Many of my critics would claim that my process of catching early morning garage sales and picking out valuable clothing items at a discounted price was taking advantage of people trying to make a buck or two by exploiting their lack of information. This criticism, I find, is wrong on a few fronts.

The Category of Means

The prerequisites of all human action can be described as the following:

1. Man is uneasy.
2. Man desires a less uneasy (more satisfactory) state.
3. Man expects that a utilization of means will achieve the desired end (casuality).

When these prerequisites are met, man acts.

All variables of his general environment that he expects he can change or alter will be his means he uses towards his attempt at achieving his ends.

For example,

1. Man is uneasy due to his pale skin.
2. Man desires a tan to replace his pale skin.
3. Man expects that a utilization of his credit line (the means) to purchase a tanning bed service will achieve a nice looking tan (the end).

In this environment, he might have conditions that are unable to be changed (if it’s cloudy, he can’t remove the clouds from the sky to increase his UV exposure and consequently get a tan) and variables that he can change (the amount of credit line he is approved for to purchase goods and services).

The variables that are able to be changed (the means) are always scarce. In this example, the pale man’s money is limited by his credit line (and potentially money on a debit card, cash under a mattress, etc.), his time is limited by his expected age of death, and his effort is limited by his bodily health and the general laws of human beings.

The Allocation of Means

Since means are scarce (and they must be scarce because if they are abundant, there is no necessity to pay any attention to these means), they must be allocated by man to serve specific and limited ends. By allocating these means, man is economizing his means: Attempting to achieve his most valued ends by forgoing his least valuable ends.

The Application of This Theory of Means

This may all seem abstract but it is consistent and fundamental to all of our lives.

When I go to a garage sale, pick out an undervalued item, and resell it a couple days later, I am not simply “exploiting the innocent neighbor.” Instead,

1. The person selling the item at the garage sale is valuing the convenience of getting rid of it instantly more than the potential money they could get by spending ten hours researching and listing it.
2. The person reselling is running the risk that the item may never sell or might have been misidentified.
3. If the reseller had to drive to the garage sale, they are consequently wearing down their vehicle and spending money on gas. If the reseller walked to the garage sale, they are consequently wearing down their shoes.
4. All action taken exerts effort that could have otherwise been directed elsewhere.
5. Etc.

Moving an item from an area in which it is valued less, to an area in which it is valued more is not always a simple task. For someone who is selling primarily online, I had to do the due diligence of investing in a good camera to take photos of the item, build up a good online reputation, research how to make marketable posts (hashtags, word counts, etc. - which is not a trivial task by any means), and a plethora of other tasks that I probably don’t even realize.

What this illustrates is that the exchange at the garage sale is not zero-sum: Both parties walk away better off by their own assessment. The seller preferred the immediate cash and cleared garage space over the item; I preferred the item over the cash I paid. No one needs to lose for someone else to gain. The claim of “exploitation” smuggles in the assumption that there is some objective, correct price for the item when there isn’t.

An Extension

P.S. News Flash: Everything you buy is life is “resold” one way or another - The mom-and-pop shop you insist is “fundamentally” different than the big corporation next to it is operating under the same principles that all other companies, and humans, operate under (most people would call this the “Profit Motive” but I would call it “Human Action”).

Another Extension

Profit and cost is not wholly monetary.

One Last Extension, I Promise

The determination of a moral system’s correctedness must never be based on “feel-good sentiment.”