Hannah Montana Teaches Teens Valuable Lesson About Law of Supply and Demand
Today’s Post-Dispatch has an article about the continuing education pre-teen girls are receiving about the basic laws of economics. If large numbers of people want an item (a concert ticket) that has a limited supply (number of seats), that price will go up. Sometimes substantially. Add into the mix the strange rules of modern parenting and our entertainment-obsessed culture, and you have the perfect recipe for an extremely weird situation:
She gave in and bought six tickets from an online broker for a total of $900 for a Dec. 11 concert in Columbus, Ohio. Edelstein paid $150 for each $56 ticket. She bought two extra to sell, to help finance the family’s road trip.
Traveling to Ohio for a concert by a teenage girl. At $100 more than face value per ticket. Buying extra tickets to sell at even higher prices to finance the trip (nothing wrong with that; it’s just peculiar). It’s like a modern suburban version of Easy Rider, with two extra pop concert tickets substituted for the cocaine. If Phil Spector gets out of jail to buy this woman’s tickets in Columbus, that is really gonna freak me out.
For the record, there should be rules limiting the number of tickets one person can by, and there is nothing wrong with efforts to enforce those rules on scalpers. That would be a case of a private entity (the venue) choosing to offer its product to as many people as possible. Efforts should continue to block scalpers from buying huge numbers of tickets via computer programs, or however else they do it. But that does not mean it should be a crime for people to sell commodities they purchase for whatever price they choose. Changes to the law that legalize scalping for sporting events should be extended to concerts.
Hannah Montana tickets are not clean water after a flood, or Red Cross blood after an earthquake. Hell, they’re not even Cake tickets or something people will remember six months from now. They are just items to be bought and sold on the open market. If Hannah Montana teaches this principle to young girls, it will be an excellent lesson in basic economics, as explained decades ago by a band worth paying top dollar for.
(Note: Phil Spector played the man who bought the drugs in Easy Rider. I HATE explaining references, but considering most people won’t get it, and he is currently being tried for murder, I probably needed to do so.)
