The Guy All the Ignoramuses Love to Hate

The great libertarian Walter Block wrote a book called Defending the Undefendable in defense of a rogues’ gallery of people we’re all taught to despise.

One of those people is the middleman.

Everyone hates the middleman. They think: the middleman takes a product created by someone else, adds nothing to it, and sells it for a higher price.

Even a handful of libertarians, evaluating the eCommerce presentation by Steve Clayton, feel uncomfortable at the prospect of being middlemen. I want to add value, they protest.

So even among libertarians, the myth of the middleman as an exploitative and unproductive parasite is alive and kicking.

I want to beat it down with a baseball bat.

Think of how many products are for sale around the world. Who can know what the number is? But it must be astronomical.

Nobody can know them all, and nobody can fish through them all to find the ones that would benefit him.

The middleman takes this task upon himself. He sorts through the virtually infinite supply of different goods to find ones he thinks will please a particular audience, and he then promotes them and makes them available to that audience.

This is a specialized service. The manufacturers of these products are not experts in this. Knowing how to produce something, and knowing how to find people who will want it and then persuade them to buy are two very different things. The middleman specializes in the latter. It’s all part of the division of labor.

Without the middleman, manufacturers would have to take upon themselves a task for which they are unsuited — and we can know they are unsuited for it in that they prefer to deal with middlemen over the general public.

So don’t let the anti-capitalist propaganda get you down.

Instead, learn how to open your own online store, even as a stone-cold newbie. Think of it as your insurance against the pink slip. That is, until the day you march in and tell The Man to take this job and shove it.

(I’ve already done that, but I’m going to open one of these stores anyway, so I can show my kids another way they can support themselves someday.)

But how would I do this? Where do I get the stuff? What do I choose?

That is so covered.

This webinar replay comes down for good at midnight:

https://www.happyearner.com/factoryreplay

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