Your ticket, your business #scalping

There’s been outrage –outrage! – about folk scalping their tickets for the Super 15 final.

Some folk are proposing “solutions.”

I say –as I’ve always said – that it’s your ticket, your business.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Seagull? No, it’s a duck.

Don’t look now. Dr Richard McGrath is back with his formerly regular column. This week: Is that a bird, or a plane? No, it’s a duck!

Assuming Trevor Mallard still possesses any shred of integrity after a lifetime in the public trough, then his exposure this week as a 'ticket-scalper' will only move forward its inevitable extinction. 

In 2006 The Mallard stated quite baldly: "When there is bulk buying of tickets to [major] events simply for the purpose of profiteering, scalping is a rip-off that could deny many people the opportunity to see [the] event."

It’s now revealed he made a tidy TradeMe profit on a major Wellington event happening this weekend.

In 2011 his party went to the polls demanding those accruing profit on their assets be his hard by the grey ones.

And despite him "struggling to see the difference in principle between tickets and houses,” he sees no problem now with either the sale or his price-gouging.

If any integrity is left him after his playing away from home and his court appearance for assault, his lies about “bag men” and cash for policies and his attack on Brethren church-goers as “chinless scarf wearers, then to retain whagt little is left he should at least hand over the dirty profits to the ticket issuer, or perhaps pay a contribution to the government based on capital gain—a voluntary proposition the IRD website helpfully makes possible.

Not that I se any problem myself, mind you, in either ticket scalpers or profit-takers. Unlike the daily labours of politicians, both help the market.

In my view, and against the previously stated views of The Duck, all laws that impede a free, uncoerced market in goods should be scrapped—including any that prohibit the reselling of concert tickets. Ironically, under a government 'led by my Libertarianz party, Scalper' Mallard would be able to sell as many concert tickets to unsuspecting teenagers as he liked. But not a government headed by his own party.

It is difficult however to see how an unapologetic Mallard will possibly be able to explain his way out of this latest disaster, unless of course he truly believes there should be one law for politicians and another law for the rest of us.

Perhaps now the Hutt South Scalper has realised the virtues of the market first-hand he could do the decent thing for a change: "So how about a ticket to the Lady Gaga concert for my daughter?"

Dr Richard McGrath is a Masterton GP and the leader of New Zealand’s Libertarianz Party.
When prodded hard, he writes a regular semi-regular very occasional column for NOT PC.

The problems with the Mises Institute

Let me take a moment to give you a brief public notice.  Since I regularly recommend that readers head to the Mises Institute for rational writing in economics, I need to also let you know that I have serious reservations about their non-economic writing.

That is to say that when the economists of the Mises Institute write about economics, using the insights of the Austrian tradition of economics, there are few better – as last year’s much-needed Bailout Reader should demonstrate. When the Institute’s economists write outside their field however, they are universally awful. Specifically, they are awful on intellectual property, on foreign policy, on religion, on anarchy, and on how the South will rise again.  (On morning drinking, of course, they’re fundamentally sound.)

And they’re not just awful: their writings on these subjects are in opposition to Ludwig von Mises’s own writings on these subjects – or the first four subjects, anyway.  So as a “Mises Institute” it’s only on economics (and morning drinking) they can be taken seriously on “what Mises would have said.”
Just thought you should know. In my view, for all their heroic work in resuscitating the economic thoughts and writing of Ludwig von Mises and his colleagues in the Austrian tradition, the Mises Institute should more accurately be re-named the Rothbard Institute, with all that implies.

And for those still confused about Mises’s own views on intellectual property (which includes his followers at the Mises Institute), Mises’s translator, editor, and bibliographer Bettina Bien Greaves summarises here. Short story: “Without copyright protection, musicians, authors, and composers are in the position of having to bear all the costs of production while the benefits go to others.”

Scalping the Big Day Out

Big Day Out promoters are bleating about ticket scalpers, meaning (to the promoters) everyone who bought a ticket and then resold it. Naughty people. People who buy these tickets face being barred from the venue tomorrow, says a snippy Big Day Out promoter, Campbell Smith.

What a dickhead. A voluntary seller does a deal with a voluntary buyer; they both get what they want, no-one misses out ... and Campbell Bloody Smith and Trevor Bloody Mallard want to pass laws to put a stop to it. What a pair of dickheads. I could explain at length why they're dickheads, but I don't need to: you see, I'd hardly need to change a word from what I said when I explained how the U2 promoter was just as economically illiterate, another poor lamb who simply doesn't understand a good thing when it leaps up and helps him out financially...

LINKS: Scalpers cash in on Big Day Out - NZ Herald
Scalping U2 - Not PC (Dec, 2005)

RELATED: Economics, Music, New Zealand

Scalping U2

NEWSTALK ZB: The promoter for the sold-out U2 concert next March is angry about the speed with which some people sold on their tickets. Some tickets for the first gig were being offered on internet auction sites within minutes of being issued. They have since sold for as much as $2000. Promoter Michael Coppel says it is fair enough for people who change their minds or find they cannot go to look for a buyer. However, in this case, he says there is obviously some deliberate scalping.

Leaving aside that, in my view, people who like U2 deserve to be taken for a financial ride just as far as their musical taste has been, we have here a promoter - who you would think would have at least a modicum of financial sense - bleating about people re-selling their tickets, poor lamb, and whinging that the asking price for some is 'beyond their fair value.' The poor lamb is economically illiterate, and he doesn't understand a good thing when he sees it...

First of all, 'fair market value' for a U2 ticket is not what the promoter thinks it is, or what I think it is (personally, I'd pay to stay away if I had to): The 'fair market value' for a ticket is an agreement between the seller of that ticket, and the buyer of that ticket, if one can be found. Fair market price in essence is whatever a punter is willing to pay.

If some punters want to pay what you or I think is silly money, then that's nobody's business but the buyer's and the seller's. People pay good money for lots of things that you and I don't like; the market value for them is set by those who do like them.

'The market' is not some disembodied tablets in stone, upon which, for example "the market value of U2 concert tickets" is written: the ticket for a U2 show has no 'intrinsic value' whatsoever, they're just bits of paper making a promise -- their 'value' is what the buyer decides they're worth (if a buyer can be found).

If someone is idiotic enough to pay big money so they can stand in a tent in Auckland and hear Bono bellow over the top of some guitar effects and recycled melodies, then that's the lookout of the idiot. As long as he or she has money to spend on an evening with an superannuated Celtic blowhard, and that's the way they want to spend it, then the fair market value is whatever that punter is willing to pay. At the time of writing, you can pick up a brick and a used battery with U2 concert info on TradeMe for just a dollar ("a great Xmas present" is the tagline on the brick), or pay one dollar for a genuine ticket (only used once) or you can start the bidding at $140 for two tickets to the Auckland show, or you can watch the boneheads cirling around at prices with lots of zeroes (amazing how many 'new' TradeMe bidders are offering silly money trying to 'spike' the auctions).

But our promoter makes another mistake in his complaint about scalpers. An official ticket seller is just the chap who gets them first -- the market gives him no more special status than if he'd dropped down from heaven to announce the first trump.

In fact, the scalper offers a valuable service both to consumer and to promoter. To the consumer, the scalper offers the service of offering tickets that might not othewise be available, and on occasions at a price less than face value (as these tickets soon might be now that a second U2 concert has been announced).

Personally, I've been very happy over the years to take advantage of a scalper's offer of tickets to shows and sports events that otherwise would be unavailable. Wimbledon, the Proms and London's second Velvet Underground show might all have been off-limits to me if not for a friendly scalper -- boy, was I happy to find them.

To the promoter, the scalper offers the service of security, and financial stability. The promoter calculates what he needs to cover his money and to make his profit: the scalper takes the risk upon his shoulders of this figure meeting the market value. It's a form of basic arbitrage.

With the U2 concert, the scalpers win (but see the caveat above with the second concert now being announced). But there's many a concert and a sporting event which hasn't proved so popular with the punters, and where scalpers themselves have been scalped -- in that case they're giving financial support to the promoter that might just be a lifeline. I'm sure Daniel Keighley, for example, would have been very happy to have had his Sweetwaters tickets scalped before the show; at least that means some people might have paid to get in, and Keighley might have made his money back instead of losing it. Financial security is something he might be willing to pay for now.

Anyway, as David Slack says, there is some good news for people who haven't managed to snap up U2 tickets to either concert. "The wonderful news is that in fact that U2 is not the only band in the world. And as if that revelation isn't exciting enough, some of them will be coming to New Zealand! This summer! Exciting details here, here, here and here."

And if you can't find a scalper around for those, there's always Parsifal in March. :-)

Linked stupidity: Anger over U2 ticket sales