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This column was hoping that senseless political attacks on vaguely defined “price-gouging” had died with the Kamala Harris for President campaign. But even though Ms. Harris lost in November, it seems her policy influence has survived the change of administrations. Regardless of party, politicians cannot seem to resist a desire to interfere in market pricing. Anne Steele reports for the Journal: President Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at cracking down on ticket-price gouging and other exploitative practices by middlemen like ticket brokers, calling for stronger enforcement of consumer-protection and tax laws. The order states: America’s live concert and entertainment industry is the envy of the world. But it has become blighted by
unscrupulous middlemen who sit at the intersection between artists and fans and impose egregious fees while providing minimal value. Ticket scalpers use bots and other unfair means to acquire large quantities of face-value tickets and then re-sell them at an enormous markup on the secondary market, price-gouging consumers and depriving fans of the opportunity to see their favorite artists without incurring extraordinary expenses. Now the White House is attacking secondary markets? Perhaps soon someone will have to explain the value of stock exchanges. Wayne Crews explains at Forbes why this is a terrible precedent even if the order itself has relatively little
impact on the U.S. economy: With Kid Rock standing beside him in the Oval Office, Trump signed the “Combating Unfair Practices” executive order, empowering the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Treasury Department. But if markets can’t handle price resale markets and venue ownership competition in the case of mere entertainment, the implication is that they can’t handle anything, let alone critical sectors like retirement, education, energy, or health care—nor much of the subject matter of Trump’s deregulatory executive orders. Trump’s remark on ticket scalping—“I didn’t know too much about it, but I checked it out and it is a big problem”—was something of a red flag.
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