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You seem confident that you know me pretty well for someone who has read two of my comments on Digg.

On the other hand, you have not actually engaged with my argument and your argument is riddled with problems I have already raised. I'll address these points again, for your benefit.

"There's a reason why 27 states prohibit ticket scalping to some degree."

Appeal to authority. Yawn. Many states prohibited interracial marriage and we were not impressed by appeals to those laws.

"It's unethical. "

What is "it" in this sentence? "Scalping," I guess. What's "scalping"? It seems to be defined as reselling a ticket with any markup. Why are event tickets the only good not subject to a secondary market based on demand? I don't grasp the premise. Why are concert tickets a unique good that cannot be resold? What about them puts them in that category?

"The scalpers are not providing a service. "

This is easily disprovable via a hypothetical which I have already mentioned in this thread. Lets say that I am a LCD Soundsystem fan and did not find out about the show until after everyone else did. If my friend has a ticket and he really wants to go, but I'm a bigger fan of LCD Soundsystem then he is, there is a difference in how much we want to go, which can be measured in price. If there were no value provided by the access to otherwise unavailable tickets, no one would pay for it.

The fact that I did not find out about the show until the tickets were not available at retail does not actually say anything about whether I "deserve" them or not in the squishy way that "fans" "deserve" these tickets at some arbitrary price. If, instead of this person being my friend, this person is a "scalper," it seems that suddenly the service they provide (access to an otherwise unavailable good) is considered immoral. But only for event tickets!

I can see why you feel the fan loses in the case where some tickets go unsold, because you believe that they "could" have bought the ticket if the secondary market in goods magically didn't exist, unlike how it exists for every other good. From what I can tell, the people who really lose if a scalper hoards tickets and no one buys them because they are priced too high are.. the venue. Because the venue makes their money by having a packed house of people buying overpriced alcohol. It is probably not surprising that the venues are the ones most opposed to ticket "scalping". Do you or LCD Soundsystem have any evidence that this kind of underfilling happens in a meaningful percentage of cases, or this one in specific?

"They're just taking advantage of somebody who was a little slow on the draw when it came to purchasing a ticket through an online system that was unable to handle the traffic."

The value here is available to those who are not "slow on the draw." I have seen no citation whatsoever, from LCD Soundsystem or you or anyone else, regarding the system being "unable to handle the traffic." All I have heard is the usual conjecture that if supply exceeds demand, it is because of shadowy "manipulators" of value. Citation needed.

"It's UNETHICAL."

I wasn't convinced the first time you said this, but now that you've put it in ALL CAPS, I'm all turned around on the subject.

"At the risk of sounding like I'm painting with a broad brush here, your entire attitude is a contributing factor in why a lot of decent, hard-working people think the free market is filled with parasitic scumbags. Did you ever stop to consider the monetary damage ticket scalpers inflict?"

The "monetary damage" that scalpers "inflict" could be trivially avoided if ticket prices were scaled with the demand for same. There would be no opportunity whatsoever for them to engage in arbitrage, and earn all the money they might earn that way. However this was infeasible in the past due to paper ticket sales, and people don't like the idea of people paying different prices for things, so we continue to resist this solution.

Instead of acknowledging that, like for every other good or service, there will always be a secondary market and building that into OUR price model, we prefer to criminalize normal market behavior. It gives us a chance to moralize and to imagine shadowy enemies who are responsible when we, for example, don't get the concert tickets we want. For the.. win?

"Purchasing tickets to sell them at 3x the face value places them out of the reach for quite a few people. "

Is there some ethical reason why people have a right to have access to any particular good at any particular price?

"Adding additional dates so that additional fans can attend a farewell event is, indeed, "pro-fan.""

Yes, it certainly is "pro-fan" to INCREASE SUPPLY when DEMAND drives up PRICES.. however it just proves that the scalpers (if they exist!) take on unknowable risk when they spend their capital. Getting more than your initial investment in things, due to shouldering risk, is how capitalism works. Perhaps if James Murphy wants to avoid being a craven capitalist he should stop charging people more for his CDs than it costs to make them. Cost the limit of price!

Telling people who have purchased a good that they are necessarily unethical if they resell it at a profit when market conditions change does not seem to be respectful to me. Imagining, without any discernable proof, that the natural action of the marketplace is, rather, shadowy SCALPERS does not seem like a reasonable perspective on the behavior of humans. YMMV, and clearly does.

"More fans will be able to attend the concerts, won't have to sell blood for a month to afford tickets = pro-fan."

Sell blood? Concert tickets are now an essential good such that one would sell blood to be able to afford them? Ooook.

"Also, not at all surprised that somebody spewing your brand of poisonous rhetoric is unable to distinguish between "immoral" and "unethical.""

Your inability to understand my argument (or basic economics) does not decrease my understanding of morals and ethics. Cheers.

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