The fees alone are one thing. But the fees that are a percentage of the purchase price are quite another. That transforms them from fees into a tax.
Fee or Commission works fine here. The line item for sellers/buyers agent isn't "tax" when you buy/sell a house despite it being a percentage.
It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.
Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.
More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
This is actually equally as cancerous - there is a reason realtors have one of the biggest lobbying groups in America.
They're rentseeking
They're just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
Like prison phone companies.
> They’re just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
The term for that is “monopoly rent”, it is a subtype of economic rents (which are distinct from, but overlap, “rents” of goods or services for a finite time as distinct from sales.)
Actions taken in pursuit of economic rents are called “rent-seeking”.
Rent-seeking is not merely pricing your product as high as the market will bear.
Ticketmaster adds value. They just charge exorbitant fees.
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Edit: But OK, you can argue that their full vertical integration (ticketing-venue-artist management) is maximizing their position for the furtherance of increasing their fees, and that would be rent-seeking. I don't see it that way, but I won't argue against interpreting them as a coercive monopolist, which is close enough.
No, that's “economic rent”, of which monopoly rent is an extensively-studied subtype. (Monopoly is position.)
Rent-seeking is pursuing economic, including monopoly, rents.
I'm not going to claim Ticketmaster is charging a "honest" amount but I will claim it should be called a "fee" and not a "tax".
Presumably the _average_ fee is the cost to provide the service (including the profit they want to make on it). So the more expensive tickets subsidize the cheaper ones.
Fee is a fee, no matter it is fixed sum of percentage. Same with taxes - they are not always a percentage.