Everything I Learned About Capitalism, I Learned on eBay

​On some day back in early 1999, I walked into a baseball card shop and saw, in one of the glass cases, ​a glistening Charizard card staring back at me. I used my last $5—the whole of my allowance money—to make that card mine. I would treasure it and the tiny "Edition 1" stamp on the left side of the fire-breather.

And then, a month later, I sold it on eBay.

I was 11 years old, still in elementary school, and I had just learned more about capitalism than any class I've ever taken—up til then, or since.

$150 is a lot for a piece of cardboard, but I quickly learned that things are worth what someone will pay for them. That's not a groundbreaking discovery, but it's an important one, for a preteen.

My sale of that Charizard card started a several year infatuation with eBay: I went from exchanging Pokemon cards for money orders (this was pre-PayPal) to selling my old Beanie Babies, to selling my dad's vintage whiskey decanters and my uncle's old comic books. I sold extra concert tickets and then, seeing how successful it was, I sold concert tickets I bought specifically to scalp. I once bought 20 copies of NBA 2K2 at Best Buy for $1 each, because the Dreamcast was dying and the store wanted to get rid of them. I sold them for $20 a pop on eBay.

I'm writing this not to brag about making a couple hundred bucks as a middle schooler. Instead, I just want to argue that, even today, eBay is the purest, most accessible bastion of capitalism out there. And it's something that everyone should try, at least.

Capitalism might not be the best economic system, and it certainly seems like it has some ​inherent problems with the whole the rich get richer, the poor get automated thing we have going on right now. But, like it or not, that's the game we (in the US, at least) must play. And eBay is the quickest way to learn how the game works.

You can sell just about anything on eBay (within reason, excluding body parts and drugs and explosives), to people all over the world. It is the world's biggest yard sale, and no one pays a cent more than what, quite literally, the world thinks it should cost.

And that's the value of eBay: Throughout my life, I've met many a delusional person who thinks that their shit is somehow worth more than market value just because it's theirs.

You know the type—it's the person whose prices on old CRT televisions are FIRM at the flea market; the ones who want to sell a board game with half the pieces missing for whatever they paid for them in the first place; the ones who spend a huge amount of their and your time getting upset at gas prices, etc.

It is a laudable goal to not be one of those people, and eBay teaches you the value of, well, everything, very, very quickly. There's no quicker way to be knocked down a peg than selling a hand-curated set of grass-type Pokemon cards you thought was worth a fortune (as informed by your earlier Charizard sale) for $.99 plus shipping.

And the second you learn that the price of things is not what the manufacturer says it is, it's a weird combination of how desirable, how rare, how vintage, how weird, and how collectible it is, plus a little seasonal multiplier (Christmas, Valentine's Day), you are free. You are free from attaching a monetary sentimentality to mass-manufactured junk that you happen to own and you are free from the rage most feel at overpaying a scalper for tickets and you are free from having to pay attention in economics class ever again, because you will have learned how the damn world works.

You will never, ever, spend weeks posting hundreds of your grandma's old VHS tapes on eBay, at a price she demands. You'll just say, hey, Grandma: Donate the stupid things. And you'll be done with it.