The Conservative Cat

One of the difficulties with capitalism is that you really can't predict what consumers will want. If we could, then socialism would work. It doesn't bother us when somebody gets rich off of a complicated idea. For example, Edwin Land deserved his fortune because it took a whole lot of smarts to make a camera that developed its own photos. But it really bothers people that Gary Dahl became a millionaire because of the pet rock. Anybody could have come up with THAT idea. It makes us feel somehow inferior that we didn't have the sense to sell boxes of rocks ourselves.

See, what we don't understand is that for every stupid idea that works, a whole bunch more fail to get off the ground. We just don't hear about them.

Sometimes even the complicated ideas fail. If you blinked, you would have missed Nintendo's next-generation 3-D portable game system, the Virtual Boy. And Microsoft doesn't rule the world because of monopoly tactics; it's because Microsoft's competitors were wiped out by the failure of the first truly multi-tasking operating system for the PC-- OS/2.

So Gary Dahl didn't cheat you out of a great money-making scheme! He won a lottery you didn't know about-- the great, unpredictable crapshoot of the U.S. market. Because the potential rewards of winning that crapshoot are so enormous, the game has a lot of players, and that's led to the manufacture a lot of cool stuff for all of us to buy.

Including the occasional pet rock.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat