The guy hoarding sanitizer and medical products profiled in the Times deserves all the pillorying that's happening, but I can't help but look underneath and see the systemic forces that have made the field ripe for such choices and actions. nytimes.com/2020/03/14/tec…
Clearly the guy didn't have exposure to the kind of ethical and moral instruction which would cause him to think of others in this kind of situation. Oops...he's a veteran of the Armed Forces. 
The main subject of the article says he makes six-figures doing this. There's a name for it, "retail arbitrage." A form of arbitrage is essentially what tanked the housing market in 2008. People made trillions off that. This guy has simply scaled the American Dream to the home.
Notice that most of the stuff this guy sells is temporary fads, stuff that's going to fill landfills in months. We're looking at what happens when the best way to get rich is through inserting oneself in the bottomless American thirst for consumption.
Look at this guy's rationale "fixing inefficiencies in the market." Never mind that it's ridiculous to think that shipping small quantities of product around the country is somehow "efficient," but consider the atmosphere that allows one to arrive at this rationale.
I have to think in year's past this guy would recognize that he's an unethical/immoral profiteer, but in the present age he's able to convince himself that he's moral. After all, he's just doing what AirBnB does or Uber does. He's a small business entrepreneur.
It's a "public service." Consider the array of CEO's at Trump's presser yesterday talking about public service, including the CEO of Walmart, a company whose bolstered by the public assistance that flows to their grossly underpaid workforce.
The Purell Profiteer is simply the logical extension of the culture we've created and if you want to find its contemporary origins, I suggest looking at the Reagan Revolution. We are in an end-times apocalypse initiated in 1980.
There's no reason the government couldn't stockpile resources to deal with pandemics, not just sanitizer and masks, but other medical equipment like ventilators, which we're about to run tragically short of. But there's no profit in it. It's "waste." Instead we get this.
The U.S. is the richest country in the world and we are richer than at any time in our existence and yet people are about to die for lack of supplies and equipment. Meanwhile, our White House is calling press conferences to praise the private market for stepping up in a crisis.
It's a collective sickness. It's not just the Purell Profiteer.
