The market is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around.
That already happens today. It's just that competition provides a counterbalance to foodmakers raising their price to infinity.
Why should tickets to a Rammstein concert sell for any price but what people are willing to pay for? This isn't exactly food or healthcare we're talking about.
Substitute X for whatever you want, and any affirmative response would be equivalent to saying "nobody should have X except the rich". If you agree with that sentence, then that's no other argument I can bring to the table.
I disagree with your opinion. Money is just a middleman - and a mathematical device used by the cunning to take everything away from everyone else and essencially enslave the world.
Food, water and shelter is obvious. Is there anything else you consider important except those three? If not, would you be willing to live a life where the only things available to you are food, water and shelter - i.e. a life of a prison inmate, or a labour slave?
You have incorporated the word "important" into your opinion, but you haven't explained what you mean by that word. Walking away from a discussion like that without explaining what you mean by the (subjective) word you used is nothing short of rude. Especially combined with the snarky remark about your own entertainment.
If you want to spill out your opinions, without engaging in further discussion when asked, feel free to open a personal blog.
Sounds like a plot to a dystopian movie to me.
If you are one of the wealthiest people perhaps you should consider the fact that you have been pretty lucky in life already, even if you sometimes can't attend a concert you really wanted to.
> There were hundreds of tickets available for around $25 the day of the concert.
This was not the case in Los Angeles even for general admission or the nosebleeds, and especially not if you want to be at the very front. Why you saw $25 tickets in Philly, I have no idea. I don't think I've ever been to one of their shows in the United States where tickets were as cheap as $25 for presale.
I've never paid more than $40 for a show in the east.
Something everyone can afford isn't a luxury. Food is a luxury in certain nations. Food is just another everyday regular bullshit item here in America, or in Sweden, or Denmark. Not everyone can afford a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. That's why it's a luxury SUV.
Ticket prices aren't really any different. First off, these tickets do have "fair" pricing, but what they don't have are protections. If I want to buy 153 tickets for $40 each so I can bring my entire extended family to an event, should I have the right to do that? I don't know. Obviously in America, I tend to lean more towards "yes" than "no".
I do agree with one of the posters above who said, "If someone really wants to go see a show, they'll pay whatever they have to pay." I do tend to agree with that. I don't even remember the last concert I've been to because, based on my experience, it's going to be hot, entirely too loud, entirely too distorted, and I could have a way better time in my home theater cranking a recording of a previous concert up to 50% volume and rocking out.
Frankly I don't even understand how someone could pay $50 to see a show, much less $250, but each to their own I guess.
Out of curiosity, do you wear concert earplugs? I get that some people prefer a controlled sound experience, but maybe your experience was subpar because of the loudness? I wore some concert earplugs from Amazon last weekend, everything sounded clear, and no ringing afterwards.
I think a fair price for flawless 2 carat diamonds is $100. Why won't anyone sell them to me at that price?
And more generally you can calculate a "fair" price by looking at costs and adding a comfortable profit margin on top.
Of course the concept of fair price is made up. The money itself is made up, it's just pieces of paper with serial numbers. Does that mean we all just have to bend down to every trickery ever invented by the rent seekers to extract value while bringing none? No, fuck rent seekers, their parasitic behavior ought to be punished by arbitrary rules.
Money is not sacred. The market is not sacred. It is supposed to serve people. Once it stops serving people, it ought to be changed.
Umm, that is literally how the food market works. The people selling food, including all the middle men, are selling it for as much as they can.
A sold out concert is like high end truffle... yes, they are crazy expensive, because they are rare and and in high demand. Most people can't afford to eat truffle often.
Most people have to eat cheaper food and don't get to eat truffles all the time. Because market sellers can sell their food at as high a price as they can get, more people are incentivized to produce food, and there ends up being enough food for most people to eat.
Of course the market isn't perfect, and we have to do things to make sure poor people don't starve, but that doesn't mean we stop using a market economy to allocate scarce resources.
Not to nitpick or take away from your point but this strategy is extremely myopic and counter-productive even from a maximum financial utility for the food producers as it eliminates the consumers gradually for their products destroying the demand side and the market altogether in the process.
People follow rules of the market. Market is those rules. "The market isn't real" isn't really an argument here, when you're using the mechanisms of the market itself as an argument.
> Are you proposing to force them to serve cheaper or perhaps for free?
No, I'm proposing we stop people from opportunistically extracting value without bringing any.
If you're an artist, and want to price your tickets at 1000$, and people still buy it - more power to you. If I want a cheaper show, I'll wait for another band I like to make a cheaper show.
But if you're a scalper who buys all the 10$ tickets to a show, then resells them at 100$ - effectively removing the choice of even attending a 10$ show - then you should be stopped, and, if possible, punished by law, as you're only extracting value without providing any.
The businessman philosophy of "let's price things as much as we can get away with" inevitably leads to standards of living getting shittier and shittier. Isn't the whole argument of capitalism that "competition will create abundance"? Add scalpers to the equation, and the whole argument goes down the drain. Scalping is philosophically inconsistent with capitalism.