Why So Many Empty Olympics Seats

A few days back, I suggested that maybe if the London police weren’t arresting so many people for “ticket scalping,” entering into voluntary ticket transactions, perhaps there wouldn’t be so many empty seats at the Olympics.

Tim Worstall provides some related commentary in the Forbes article titled “Of course there are empty Olympic seats: our Victorian government is arresting anyone who tries to sell them,” here’s an excerpt:

“Think it through for a moment. There are some people over here that have something they don’t value, while there are other people over there who value those things highly. What we’d like is for those things, whatever they are, to move from those who assign little value to them to those who assign a higher value to them.

This is true of anything: this movement of resources from lower to higher valued uses is known as “creating wealth.” It is the single most important contributor to the wealth of nations. It is known as “trade.”

And our government, in its wisdom, has made it illegal for anyone to broker this increase in individual and national wealth, resulting in the TV cameras of the world panning across rows of empty seats.”

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About Mark J. Perry 262 Articles

Affiliation: University of Michigan

Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan.

He holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University in Washington, D.C. and an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

Since 1997, Professor Perry has been a member of the Board of Scholars for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan research and public policy institute in Michigan.

Visit: Carpe Diem

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