The flowers of entrepreneurship bloom in the strangest places. Misesian entrepreneurs attending the rain soaked Taylor Swift concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts determined there would be a market for rain which had fallen near the pop diva.
The New York Post reported “some entrepreneurial fans are capitalizing on and trying to flog online for $250.” This brings to mind what Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, “The only source from which an entrepreneur’s profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.”
To that point, it would take a Swifty to know Swifties and their individual demand curves. Upon seeing pictures of the collected moisture one person commented “I know a weed container when I see one lol.” I can hear Murray Rothbard saying “So what, they dumped their pot in a dry place and used what they had to collect. Bravo!” In print, he wrote in Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, “[I]t is the function of the businessman, the ‘undertaker,’ the entrepreneur, to meet and bear that uncertainty by investing, paying expenses and then hoping for a profitable return.
Another online commenter (obviously not an Austrian) left the entrepreneur completely out of the process, “When the stoners and the swifties unite.” Yes, but it was entrepreneurship that brought the two worlds together. It didn’t happen magically by itself. It took forethought and action. While many are snickering at all this, we should be reminded, “No dullness and clumsiness on the part of the masses can stop the pioneers of improvement,” wrote Mises. “There is no need for them to win the approval of inert people beforehand. They are free to embark upon their projects even if everyone else laughs at them.”
“Jealous I didn’t come up with this scam first,” one user commented on an Instagram post showing a screenshot of the optimistic seller. Selling water honestly harvested from a Swift concert certainly would not be a “scam.” However, fraudsters might collect rain at another place and time and peddle the liquid as having fell ever so close to Ms. Swift. Fraud or entrepreneurship. A fine line indeed.
