Trump Crackdown on Ticket Brokers Will Make Concert Seats Tougher To Find
Plus, anti-Israel protest shuts Harvard Yard, libels Garber as child-killer
“Consumers will be better off if we deregulated scalping, let the market function.”—Then-New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, quoted in the New York Times, April 22, 2001.
“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.”— President Trump, executive order Combating Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market, March 31, 2025.
President Trump campaigned promising deregulation. But here he is imposing new regulation on “unscrupulous middlemen,” “egregious fees,” and what he describes as “price-gouging.” Even Eliot Spitzer, the Democrat from New York who was famously aggressive as attorney general, took a more free-market approach.
Maybe Trump missed class at the Wharton School on the day this was covered, but what he derides as “middlemen” serve an important function in capitalism. If consumers find a fee or price to be enormous, egregious, or extraordinary, no one is forcing them to pay it. They can stay home, or buy a ticket to a less expensive show. Or they can start their own ticket-broker business offering lower fees. Ticket brokers, like most middlemen, provide a service. They help people who have money but not the time, luck, patience, advance-planning ability, or tech savvy to navigate whatever direct sales system—wait outside on a sidewalk overnight for a wristband, get online and constantly refresh—a venue has devised. And they help people who have the time, luck, patience, advance-planning ability, or tech savvy monetize those abilities. Allowing the price mechanism to function freely lets the scarce good—a concert or sporting event ticket—go to the person who values it most.
Variable pricing is helping to maximize profits and better match supply and demand all over the economy, in sectors from hotel rooms to Uber rides. The technology allows a Red Sox season ticket holder to make their seat available for resale on an app like Stubhub or Gameday if they have a last-minute family emergency, or if the weather turns out unexpectedly cold or damp. That makes it easier for the team to fill seats that would otherwise go unfilled, and it makes it easier for fans to make a last-minute decision to head for the ballpark. Focusing only on the super-high prices—say, the seventh game of a World Series—overlooks the substantial benefits of resale markets for games that are in lesser demand.
The most sophisticated and popular performers—Taylor Swift, for example—have gotten highly sophisticated at using technology and direct relationships with fans to capture a profit-maximizing price. None of the players in this industry—the performers, the producers, the concert venues, the ticket buyers, the brokers—were born yesterday. Brokers who buy a lot of tickets early on at face value transfer some of the attendance risk away from the producers and also provide capital.
Congress might conceivably claim a Constitutional role here via the interstate commerce clause in cases of ticket sales across state lines, but as a presidential priority, this is beyond a stretch. If Trump wants to take on ticket pricing, he now has control of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and he’s also able to mount concerts on the Mall in Washington or other federal lands. Let him try. But unleashing the enforcement powers of the federal government against ticket brokers, like any government intervention in market pricing and free trade, will only make it harder to find good seats.
Laffer on Tariffs: Supply-side economist Arthur Laffer of Laffer Curve fame has a new paper out called “Impact of a 25% Tariff on U.S. Auto Industry.” It recommends that Trump remove the tariffs on cars and parts from Mexico and Canada, consistent with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, that Trump reached in his first term. That doesn’t address the tariffs on Japanese or German-built cars or the risk that Chinese electric car companies could build vast plants in Mexico to sell vehicles into the U.S. market, but at least Laffer is shrewd enough and practical enough to realize that there’s a better chance of appealing to Trump to ease the tariffs by pointing to some previous Trump accomplishment than by appealing to economic “experts” or abstract theory.
Jimmy Lai Way: Representative Christopher Smith, Republican of New Jersey, today introduced the “Jimmy Lai Way Act,” which would rename the street in front of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Washington, D.C., as “1 Jimmy Lai Way” in honor of the publisher jailed by the Chinese Communist Party. Representatives Tom Suozzi (D-NY), John Moolenaar (R-MI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) joined Smith as cosponsors, according to a press release from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Another Disruptive Harvard Anti-Israel Protest: The day after the Trump administration put $8 billion in funding for Harvard under review over the university’s failure to effectively counter antisemitism, access to central areas of the campus was blocked by a mob of students.
The planned anti-Israel rally at the Science Center Plaza was unsuccessful owing to counterdemonstrating pro-Israel activists who played the Star-Spangled Banner and two educational podcasts on loudspeakers. The crowd of more than 100 protesters then left the plaza and marched along the sidewalks outside Harvard Yard, chanting “stop the U.S. war machine” and “Garber, Garber, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today.” As the gates of the Yard were closed, the group forced their way into the Widener Gate and took control of it, as Harvard Police and security guards looked on. Once inside, they used microphones to threaten to force the university closed: “shut it down.” The main gates to the Yard, usually open, were padlocked with no explanatory signs, suggesting that administrators had been taken by surprise.
In addition to the pre-Passover event depicting Harvard President Alan Garber, who is Jewish, as a child-killer—an echo of the classical antisemitic blood libel, and in addition to the threat to shut the university down, the protest group also chanted, over electric amplification inside Harvard Yard, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (I have posted video of it on x.) On November 9, 2023, in an email headlined “Combating Antisemitism,” then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said, “our community must understand that phrases such as ‘from the river to the sea’ bear specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel and engender both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community. I condemn this phrase and any similarly hurtful phrases.”
People may blame Trump for rousing these students, but the same thing was also happening during the Biden administration. It would be nice to see some protests at Harvard in favor of freeing Jimmy Lai, or in favor of freeing the jailed mayor of Istanbul. Instead it’s “Garber, Garber, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today.” To the extent there are vocal faculty it is Levitsky and Enos trying to whip people up with the idea that Trump is about to end democracy and American higher education, or, as more than 700 faculty members put it, is engaged in an “unprecedented assault” on “bedrock principles of a democratic society.” The faculty letter urges Harvard governing boards to publicly condemn attacks on universities. They could start by condemning the knuckleheads shouting “shut it down” outside of Widener.
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On the bright side of the Harvard demonstration, the university didn't let the demonstrators bring tents into the Yard. That is better than last year, when Harvard posted a prohibition but didn't enforce it.
Furthermore, the chants of the demonstrators may signify a positive effect of the visit to Harvard of Naftali Bennett, Israel's former Israeli prime minister and PM Netanyahu's most likely successor. When Bennett visited Harvard, anti-Israel folks decided to demonstrate against him, presumably because Bennett's views are similar to those of Netanyahu. Those whose plan was to get rid of Netanyahu must be wondering now what they really want. They seem to be vocalizing a wish to slaughter or expel Jews from the river to the sea.
James Taranto ran items called "Spot the Idiots" in the WSJ Best of the Web column. The theme was that one of the best arguments for free speech is that it makes it easy to spot the idiots. But Harvard's problem is that the federal government is doing the spotting and holding Harvard accountable for the "river to the sea" chants as violations of Title VI that imperil federal funding.
If the performers are selling their tickets below market value, middlemen will use bots to buy the tickets and mark up the prices. The easiest solution is for performers to sell at market value, as airlines do, with prices fluctuating with demand.
If performers sell tickets for $100 and the middlemen re-sell for $200 the performers shouldn't feel they are making things more expensive for the public by selling instead for $200. They should take the $200 and do other things to benefit the public if they feel charitable.
It is not clear how much the executive order accomplishes. The EO is pretty vague except for calling for enforcement of existing law. Enforcement is by the FTC or the States, so the effect of the EO may be to make the FTC pay attention.