I was at the grocery store today when I came upon a girl scout dressed in her uniforms selling Krispy Kreme donuts for $3 each.
Approaching the stand, one of them greeted me perkily, asking if I would like to buy a donut to support research for breast cancer.
This piqued my interest - “how does buying these donuts support breast cancer research?” I inquired.
The little girl smiled and responded by saying that they sell the donuts at a $1.00 markup, so each donut sold equals one dollar for cancer research.
I thought about this for a few seconds and then pointed out that marking up the donuts was creating an inefficiency in the market, that exploiting the sense of guilt of passers-by they were distorting incentive structures and causing capital allocation inefficiencies.
I also pointed out that, objectively, raising money at the micro-level to pass along to some charity was an incredibly poor method of encouraging cancer research. Far more effective would be encouraging every citizen who stopped at her booth to spend that one dollar on the equity of a major drug producer, to provide them with the raw free capital to engage in drug exploration and to signal to the market the need for such drugs.
The little girl frowned and her eyes grew kind of blurry, she started muttering something about how they were just trying to help any way they can.
I, of course, expertly disarmed this by citing Ayn Rand: “It's simple to seek substitutes for competence – such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”
At this point the girl started crying and some woman, probably her mother, came up to me to ask what had happened.
I then proceeded to explain how her misguided attempts to teach her daughter empathy were actually her inculcating her in a bastardized anti-free market ideology, and how their entire schtick was a disgusting attempt to make themselves superior to their fellow citizens by virtue of charity.
Anyway, this woman asked me what the hell was wrong with mr, so realizing I was dealing with a profoundly irrational actor I quickly went back to shopping. She ended up finding a security guard who kicked me out of the store by threatening to call the cops (agents of the states violence), further demonstrating the irrational devotion of these statists to their genocidal ideology.
Anyway, the real lesson here is that people don’t care about the problems they claim to care about.
If that girl scout sincerely cared about breast cancer research she would have understood the importance of capital markets and economies of scale to drug development, or at least been open to learning about such things.
Even if her ignorance could be justified by juvenile naivety, the ignorance of her guardan was inexcusable.
Most people’s stated goals, concerns, and cares are actually a thin coat of paper over an internal set of desires and neuroses they are constantly trying to assuage. Taking their stated objectives at face value is a one-way ticket to disappointment.
Lesson in there.
