Wil's Rant

I must be missing something here. Apparently, 8 e-bay sellers have received a large fine for falsely bidding up items they were selling. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. Hell, I have a 99 Cavalier that I would be very happy to sell to someone for thirty-thousand dollars but I actually don't think that there is anyone stupid enough to buy it for that price. Just because someone suggests that we buy something at a given price doesn't mean that we should do it. Whatever happened to "Let the Buyer Beware". If someone sees something on E-Bay, an auction, and decides that they are going to keep on bidding no matter what the price, is the seller at fault? Even if the seller bids themselves, the buyer still has the right not to bid any further. In one of the cases, a man bought a Jeep for several thousand more than it was worth. My first response is to think " What an Idiot". We are not talking about some forged work of art, or some item having been misrepresented. We are talking about a known make of vehicle whose resale value is widely recognized. If the purchaser felt that it was in his interests to pay more than the Jeep was worth, who is at fault? In my view it's the buyer. Maybe he just really liked the colour. Here is another example. I have a brand new Canadian ten dollar bill, value- ten dollars. Say I take this ten dollar bill and auction it on E-Bay as a collectors piece, not untrue as someday it will actually have more than a ten dollar value ( Maybe 200 Years). In a bidding frenzy a group of fools decides to drive the price of this ten dollar bill up over a thousand dollars. Seeing lotteries in my head, I am more than willing to sell it for this amount even if I totally don't understand the reason anyone would pay such a price. As far as I know, the law doesn't require me to refuse the sale because I personally don't value the ten that much. There is no accounting for taste. If I were to try to falsely drive up the price I would think that level heads would prevail and the bidding would come to an abrupt halt. I guess this is simply not the case. All that is really needed to make a huge profit on E-Bay is a lot of bids. People see the activity and assume that there is a really great deal here, despite all common sense when it comes to the price. I doubt I will ever sell that Cavalier for thirty-thousand, there just isn't anybody that stupid. Even if there was I probably would consider them mentally incompetent and wouldn't want to take advantage of someone with diminished capacity. However, there seems to be an awful lot of these individuals on E-Bay, both the unethical sellers and challenged buyers. Big tip, just because there are a lot of individuals prepared to pay ten times the value of an item just because it's bidding rapidly on E-Bay doesn't mean that we have to buy it. Short of proving that the buyer was diminished, I don't see this as a police matter unless the product was misrepresented in some way.