Randy Cassingham's Blog

After seeing my note from last week, and then seeing a paid ad for the Free State Project in True, Tim in New Hampshire wrote to complain:

Your constant crowing about just how terrific it is aside, I am unlikely to ever become a Premium subscriber to 'This Is True' for the following reasons:

1. Your hiring of an assistant, which you announced last week*. If you are making enough money to hire an assistant to help you provide a service which many others provide for free, you can surely live without my $20.
2. Your trumpeting of your upcoming trip to England, which you announced this week. Once again, if you can afford a trip to England, something which is well beyond my means these days, you most assuredly can live without my $20.
3. But the true icing on the cake is accepting paid advertising from the Free State Project, whose stated goal is to move 20,000 Libertarians into my home state of New Hampshire. To my mind, this is the most unforgivable reason of the lot and I know my $20 would be much better spent helping any Libertarian who wishes to move to Colorado instead of New Hampshire rather than on your upkeep."

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"Live free or die," eh, Tim? OK, let's see about your complaints:

1. I actually never boast about how great Premium True is. I do, however, post a tiny fraction of the letters I get from people who have upgraded and want to say how pleased they are. (I never boast about how good the free True is, either. People will either like it, love it, or not. My telling them to love it won't make it happen.)
2. You get what you pay for. Or, actually, when it comes to the free edition of True, you get lots more than you pay for. My offer is, if you truly enjoy True (and I have no problem if you don't, but then why do you bother reading it?), I provide an upgrade path to get about double the stories without any advertising for about the cost of a postage stamp per week. That's it: you pay, you get it. I do not offer an option of dictating what I spend the money on, even if you were stupid enough to agree to let your employer do that.
3. Yep, part of the fee helps pay for my part-time assistant. Just like part of the cost of the food you buy from the grocer pays not only for the clerk who checks you out, but for the guy who stocks the shelves and cleans up the mess you leave on the floor. Since you "don't have the means" to have a janitor at home, are you going to refuse to buy food? Why or why not?

4. I don't think announcing I'm going to host a "gathering" for my readers when I travel to do research on a book project is exactly "trumpeting", but why would you think that your $20 would pay for that? It's not only not a This is True book, it's for a major publisher. Have you never heard of expense reimbursements in a mainstream book contract, or even in a responsible job? No, wait... I don't suppose you have.
5. Yep, the current advertisers pay for your free subscription. If you hate Libertarians, be gleeful that they used their money to give you something you like. If you don't like the advertisers, then don't support them. (If you appreciate that they make your subscription possible AND need the goods or services they offer, then DO support them!) If you simply hate all ads, then we've got that nice option of an ad-free edition with double the stories.
6. All your whining does is provide more content for True, which (in case you hadn't noticed in the last year of getting it for free) is about how stupid people can be. Thanks for providing some extra entertainment for the readers who "get it".

*Actually, I didn't announce my assistant last week; it was previous to that. Here's the paragraph Tim complained about:

I finally reached the breaking point. After years of 10- to 15-hour days, seven days a week, I finally have hired my first employee to take on some of the workload. (My wife has helped for years, but she has her own business to take care of and couldn't keep devoting more and more time to True.) Once my new assistant gets up to speed and caught up with all sorts of back work, I'll be able to concentrate more on the things that only I can do. I've (just barely!) been able to keep up with my e-mail (reading it, that is; I'll never be able to reply to more than a small portion) and other day-to-day tasks, but with Holly taking over some of the more routine details maybe I'll finally have a chance to stop and smell the scent of fresh pine wafting in the windows.

Yep, Tim's quite the prince: he wants me to continue to work beyond my "breaking point" and work 10- to 15-hour days, seven days a week, to produce True for him for free. That's not an idiot, that's an asshole.