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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

You can't ignore the laws of economics and expect them to go away, any more than you can ignore the law of gravity and expect not to die when you make a high impact landing without equipment.

Just because you don't want them to be true, does not make them true, and you can't just dismiss them. In any system with scarce resources, some rationing mechanism must be at play. If it isn't price paid, it is something else like a lottery, who you're politically connected to, etc.

Sibling comment has it right. Valve is making a choice here. I think it's a better choice than raising the price personally. I detest scalpers with a burning hatred, but the way to combat that is to understand the economics behind why and how it works, not to ignore it and dismiss it with "the rich get richer"

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These forces are reality, we all acknowledge this, but I think most of us object to their assertion it is good and drives towards FMV rather than distorts it.

Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they don’t understand basic economics. You should be a little more charitable in your discussions.

You're right I probably should be more charitable, but I don't see any other way to read GP other than them denying basic economics. The comment that they were replying to did not say it was a good thing and they liked it. Sure it may have been implicit to some, but if GP was objecting to that, they should have used something other than the word no.

If they were responding to this part:

> why would you work hard to create value for others in a system like that?

Then their answer of no makes no sense, so I don't see a way to be much more charitable

I wouldn’t call scalping “good” necessarily, but in the case of the Steam Controller, I’ve seen an awful lot of people incensed about scalping whose commentary overpowers more interesting discussion in Steam Controller communities. I’m not convinced scalping is a huge problem for the Steam Controller, a few dozen silly‐priced Ebay auctions notwithstanding. Valve’s current solutions seem helpful to me, but I see outrage threads where people advocate DRM‐locking controllers to accounts to prevent resale, or enforcing price caps on sales, both of which are far worse than allowing scalping to exist, and does suggest some lack of economic understanding (since both “solutions” would simply make Steam Controllers harder to come by).

My point is that laws of economics are unrelated to what’s good for society, and throwing out hands up and saying, “well that’s hour economics work, nothing we can do” is absurd. I don’t know what the solution is, but there doesn’t have to be an economic solution, we can find a legal solution or social solution.

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