yookay government's crusade to outlaw all useful economic activity continues apace. you can't legislate away scarcity.

EDIT:

>How is scalping a useful economic activity? What new value is created by for example buying up loads of Taylor Swift concert tickets and selling them at a marked up price?

if I don't want to wait in a queue or spam F5 on a website at 4 in the morning so I can be one of the first, I can instead pay somebody to do all that tedious work for me, and they can profit from it. this is a valuable service that I'm willing to pay for, and have in fact paid for with no regrets whatsoever.

SCARCITY IS A FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC FACT. more people want to attend a concert than there are seats available. this scarcity must be rationed in some way. there are many ways: queues, lotteries, clientelism, theft. prices are one of the more efficient mechanisms, because unlike the others, money can be directly traded, stored, accounted for, and is a means by which the value of other goods and services can be compared.

if I wait in a queue, that is a cost I have to pay, but it is simply lost. it goes nowhere. but if I pay someone else to sit in the queue for me, I can do something else useful with the time I would have spent in the queue, and that other person can then use the money to buy something else in the future. that is the value of scalping! moreover, that one other person can sit in the queue on behalf of N other people; we all benefit from this economic specialisation and reduction of redundancy.

scalpers are the unjustly persecuted heroes of our economy. they are apostates from Queueing, our national religion.

We also know prices can go up on the raw ticket and we know that consumers can bear that given where they were before this legislation. That additional money will go to Venues, Artists and Labels who will, ideally, create more and better shows for the all of us.

If you imagine today that a ticket is $45 (speaking US) and customers pay $450, eventually for it. That $405 doesn't go to the Artist or the Venue, it goes to a middle layer which adds little to no value for the eco-system beyond supporting a transaction. Moreover, when you spend all the budget on the ticket, you're less likely to buy merch and food at the venue.

Something most on this site could easily build with the help of stripe, a few database tables, and an API to the venue's ticketing management system.