I’m glad to see that somebody beat me to it.
Christopher Hitchens used to call this The Argument From Personal Incredulity—i.e. “I can’t imagine an alternative, therefore there mustn’t be an alternative!”, which I always thought had a certain ring to it. But this ‘counterargument’ sort of hinges on the degree to which your interlocutor was actually suffering from a lack of imagination.
Much as a vibe with the overall sentiment here, I am annoyed that this entire post is effectively propaganda for free market capitalism. I am willing to bet that despite the supererogatory behavior of these volunteers, the company and executives profited disproportionately.
This sort of post-hoc justification feels (to me) like elaborate apologism for having a society based on scarcity mindset, and if we could just eradicate that then maybe we’d be one step closer to solving the collective action problem at scale, and one step closer to a global utopia.
These guys are heroes and I don’t wanna bring down the vibe.