Comment on Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown
FishFace@piefed.social 5 hours agoI’m sorry, are you complaining that prices are kept artificially low?
Because I thought the question was about consumer freedom to buy something instead of the expensive ticket, not seller freedom to make as much money as possible.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I’m complaining that resale is exploitative, and that’s very much intentional
FishFace@piefed.social 5 hours ago
And I’m saying you can just choose not to buy the tickets at that price. That’s the free market in action.
There are lots of cases where the free market is clearly inappropriate. For example, I can’t just choose not to have basic utilities like water and heating, so there needs to be an appropriately regulated market to prevent price gouging. But if prices get gouged on tickets for Taylor Swift or whatever, then who cares? So only rich people can go to her concert - big deal, people who can’t afford it can:
* go to a cheaper concert by a less popular artist
* buy her album for much less
* stream her album for even less
What are the consequences if we had this model?
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
And you think it’s good that bots can automatically buy every single ticket, only to resell it at extortionate prices?
Wow, that’s a ass-backwards view if I ever saw one
FishFace@piefed.social 19 minutes ago
You didn’t reply properly. I explained the alternatives which all seem reasonable to me, which you didn’t respond to at all, and I asked you a question which you didn’t answer. I’ll answer, and explain again, but if you reply in the same dismissive way without answering properly, you’re not worth trying to hold a discussion with.
I don’t think it matters. It’s like asking if I think it’s good that diamonds are expensive due to supply-side uncompetitiveness; if you can’t afford it, you can just not buy it. Nobody needs a diamond. There’s no communist utopia where we’re handing out diamonds or Taylor Swift tickets to all citizens, right? There’s a limited number of tickets, and the people running the show can decide whether to hand them out by selling them for what people are willing to pay, by lottery, or by the current hybrid system: well below market value, but with a lottery to decide who gets to pay the suppressed price.
If the sellers’ lottery system is not working, or if they’re pretending it’s a lottery system when in fact all the tickets go to “resellers”, then that’s their problem. It’s not causing societal harm; the same number of people get to see Taylor Swift either way, and getting to see her isn’t important enough for the government to step in and say that Taytay tickets must be delivered by lottery system.
It was never about the bots; you’d be complaining if the sellers sold at market value as well; so it’s really about prices.
The government getting involved in enforcing prices is risky business and can introduce very bad unintended consequences. If nothing else, it’s just something that the government then has to do, which costs money. So it should be done in situations where the consequences of not doing so are clearly bad. The consequences of the prices of the following getting really high are really bad for society:
Where does tickets to the biggest music superstars come on this list? Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy down. It is not worth spending taxes on making sure that Taylor Swift’s ticket delivery lottery remains a true lottery.