Your breakfast this morning, the gas you burned in the car you drove to work, the device on which you are reading this post....every product in the world is purchased by someone with the intent to flip it. Or scalp it, whichever you prefer. It's called "capitalism". Sometimes flipping works out, sometimes it doesn't; that's called risk. If there were no pinball buyers with more money than patience, there would be no pinball flippers.

The flipper/scalper isn't a world-class businessman or rocket scientist, having invented super secret magic sauce. If they were, they wouldn't be screwing around trying to make what amounts to vacation money; they'd be running Google or IBM.

He's no smarter than you. But he works harder and smarter than you.

Flippers actually help a marketplace by making products available to a buyer that would otherwise have no opportunity to purchase a product, at any price. For a real world practical example, down here in sunny Florida, we have hurricanes. When one hits, power goes out for days, weeks, or more. So generators are a hot commodity, pun intended. The stores here sell out of them a week BEFORE the storm hits. So scalpers used to take their own money, fly up to Georgia, rent a truck, and hit every Home Depot and Lowes, buying a truck full of generators on their way back to Florida. They'd jack the price, hoping to make a good buck. Then the ever-so-helpful bumbling government decided that scalpers suck, just like many of you. So they passed a law against it. What happened? They stopped that scalping of generators. And in stopping that scalper, they also took the opportunity away from everyone down here to buy one. Good work, right?