buyer agrees to buy ticket at $PRICE.
how is society hurt, here?
the government banning this is immediately harmful: it prevents a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
Some systems need to work and be accessible to everyone so we can sustain peaceful and healthy society.
This is not charity, this is to account for externalities and the miscalculations in the free market. Awful lot of people are underpaid and overpaid as they progress through their lives because the markets are actually not that efficient and prices are not formed under perfect information or instantly.
You want your mechanical engineers to be able to afford decent life even if all the market current wants is JavaScript engineers because when the tides shift you may end up needing mechanical engineers to produce physical stuff so you want them around and happy.
Also, the price could actually be too low too when its optimized for short term profits. Re-sell 100GBP tickets for 500GBP, filter for money and leave out the actual fans and maybe lose all the events for the next year. If you are going to do a daytime robbery, better not ever need money again from the people you are robbing.
the high ticket prices incentivise the creation of new venues and the entrant of new artists into the market. they indicate that the music industry is not supplying concerts in sufficient quantity/quality as the market demands, or perhaps not in the right places or at the right times. prices are a signal; you outlaw them at your peril.
this is a case where the monkey-brain fairness intuition is simply flat out 100% wrong. scalper economics has been studied for decades; it is known that banning these trades exacerbates shortages. lot of ppl in this thread who would not pass introductory microeconomics.
Always amuses me that the wannabe market experts ascribe theory of mind to markets. Personal risk tolerance and ability to execute without starving is what constrains supply of talent, who are not intrinsically born with either the knowledge or capability to begin the market based transaction process.
God (or your market) does not magically whip up concerts in response to spreadsheets. People taking risks do.
It is one of the primary reasons why many people from the subway times and I’m not having a good time, like rocket scientists becoming taxi drivers
How does scalping, which transfers money from fans, artists, and the music industry to ticket touts who have nothing to do with music, "incentivise the creation" of anything? Except, I suppose, bot farms and clickfarm sweatshops?
What about some middle ground - allow sale for and below the purchase price and punish severely any profiteering? The only reason scalpers do it is for money - if the punishment and risk are big enough it solved itself.
Where I live, the biggest festival in whole country (Paleo @Switzerland) explicitly bans resale for some time and nobody real is complaining, its fair and tickets are sold within minutes of becoming available.
The last point - if some psycho is starting to shoot others because they can't go to some fucking concert then the underlying condition needs to be targeted, not sweeping reality in front of them so they never trip on some obstacle in real life. 'Eat the rich' trope is stuff immature frustrated kids tell to peers, nothing more.
The only reason people work and run businesses is for money. Not doing it for money is called a "hobby", "charity" and "volunteering".
There is no requirement for perfect information in order for a free market to function. The term for lack of perfect information is "risk" and is factored in to negotiations and the price.
Any system that relies on unselfish behavior fails.
Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”
(Attributed to J. M. Keynes: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed)
P.S. It doesn't help of course that "free" markets are never really free because they are very quickly taken over by the "nastiest men" etc. and the last thing those people care about is freedom, particularly that of the markets they make their money from.
See for instance the subject of ticket touts. There is no free market in online ticket reselling because the entire market's cornered by bot farmers who buy tickets in bulk automatically the moment they are made available and leave none for anyone else. "Free" market, my sweet little hiney.
And btw, in the UK the same thing happens with driving test slots:
if the supply of tests were allowed to rise naturally to meet the existing demand, this problem wouldn't exist. we are only in this situation because the government artificially limits the supply.
this is a very common pattern where people get upset at high prices but are completely incurious as to where the shortage really comes from.
That's called a "cartel". Cartels are unstable because they have every reason to undersell the cartel price. OPEC had a lot of problems with its members selling on the sly at lower prices.
> and share the profit
They're not going to share the profit. They're going to pocket it.
It probably falls apart on that last assumption: rich people aren't really willing to pay proportionately more for goods.
> a mutually agreeable trade that would otherwise have increased the utility of both parties.
Yet many people, possibly most people, feel something is broken.
However, entertainers have an image problem that conflicts with the desire to maximize profit. Entertainers are often times in the business of appealing to the broader public. But if they restrict their ticket sales to the highest bidder, then the broader public's appeal is limited.
Having a third party engage in the price discrimination allows the entertainer's image to remain intact, while also collecting higher prices (perhaps not from the ticket sales directly, but the third party willing to pay more for the entertainer if the entertainer allows them to resell tickets).