It's back to school for some of us.Time to wind down the eggnog and time to stock up on coffee and energy drinks.
And of course, it is time to buy our books. Many campuses feature an on-campus book store that can serve everyone's needs- for a price of course.
This is where local entrepreneurs enter the picture. Around any campus one will surely find several bastions of counter economics. Among these shops are stores that buy and sell used text books as well as stores that rent out text books for a price cheaper than buying even a used copy.
Many college campuses are rife with critics of the free market who are blind to how it helps them tremendously at the beginning of every semester. Almost everyone knows that the campus bookstore overcharges on both their new and used books, and so the shrewd student will shop around at all of the off-campus bookstores to find the cheapest price.
Critics of the free market are quick to malign the dreaded profit motive but it works beautifully here. The founders of these businesses may well have intentions of helping students or they may be solely in it for the money. But as the principle of spontaneous organization dictates, the intention is irrelevant. The market forces and competition among all the stores benefits the students.
As a result the campus bookstore knows that it can only charge so much before students will go elsewhere. In other words, there is a ceiling placed on their prices by competition with the other bookstores.
Imagine how much books would cost in the absence of any competitor to the campus bookstore. There would be virtually no limit to how much they could charge. And people think text books are expensive now!
The lesson to take from this observance is, of course, that the free market benefits us all, regardless of one's opinions about it.
Eric Sharp,Regular Columnist, THL
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