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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