goatee

As an anxious pessimist, I’ve joked that preparing for the Corona Virus has been my moment to shine. But I’ve also been thinking about the ethics of preparation and the distinction we might draw between prepping, hoarding, and profiteering.

I’m intrigued by prepping, but don’t identify as a prepper – I live in a city apartment. Nor would I want to spend thousands of dollars on the off chance I could make a go of it post-apocalypse. I find such folks amusing, a bit deranged, and, at times, a little too gleeful; but everyone needs a hobby, and I see no social harm.

And there’s much to say for being prepared for likely events that span a few weeks or months. I have a lot of toilet paper, but I usually do as I buy it in bulk from Amazon. I have a box of surgical masks, that we wear to dremel the dog’s claws. I bought a new box of N95 masks, which I use during allergy season and air travel. I bought some more gloves, which I use for bleaching my hair and doing stuff around the apartment. I stocked up on food, but will be able to eat all of it in a couple months. I got some money out before the market crashed, but my 401ks are in the same dump as everyone else’s. This was ego-centric but not anti-social behavior, done before the panic.

To prep is to skim bountiful capacity for later use. In this way, it distributes and decentralizes essential resources. My twenty pound bag of rice – plus some dried beans and tofu tetra packs – could be handy to me and others in an unforeseen crisis. There’s still the quandary of if and how to share those resources when asked by those less prepared. (See The Twilight Zone’s episode “The Shelter.”) And I wrestled with shorting in the market, but didn’t have time to open a margin account in any case.

To hoard, on the other hand, is to deprive others of resources you don’t need. To buy more than what you need when others are trying to do the same is excessive and anti-social.

Profiteering then, such as that fellow in Tennessee, is benefiting at the expense of others – he’ll never use seventeen-thousand bottles of hand-sanitizer. The anarcho-capitalist might excuse the profiteer because there’s no formal coercion, but I use a social-good test: is this a behavior that adds value to society? The profiteer is not creating more resources or value, he’s only extracting it. If he’s extracting value from purchasers who are desperate, this is exploitative. If he’s extracting value from the wealthy who can afford it, this is an unjust redistribution of resources.

Whereas the profiteer is able to extract far more value than they contribute to society, the prepper, as a type of decentralized storage, adds some.