Beware of the Doug
Nov 5 · 1 min read

David, thanks for the good read. While there’s little question many if not most of the the obscenely wealthy have the means (and seeming absence of conscience) to wreak havoc on untold number of lives, the line in your essay that stands out to me is this one: “At the time, the site was modestly profitable and operated with low overhead.” So, yes, while Ricketts and his ilk make for convenient, easily identifiable villains, why did the founders sell to him? The answer, very likely, is the money.

This is the bigger issue plaguing Capitalist culture here and elsewhere: lots of us complain about its excesses, but few if any choose to look at their own role in its destructive habits. We decry Amazon’s razing of community retailers and environmental degradation, for example, even as we continue to scoop up those conveniently delivered brown boxes from our front steps and later add that same packaging to growing mountains of ‘recyclable’ waste.

At the end of the day, I think it boils down to this: in a free-market economy, if there truly is a substantial army of souls eager to do battle with the forces of avarice, we must start first, with ourselves. If I believe in the role of an independent journalism, for example, then I must voluntarily pay for it when bumping up against those annoying paywalls. And if, as the owner of one such vehicle, perhaps even a ‘modest profit’ is preferable to surrendering it to a barbarian who cares nothing about the product or those who produce it?

    Beware of the Doug

    Written by

    “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”