One rule for concerts, another for housing
Let’s suppose that yesterday I went to a car boot sale and met a woman, down on her luck, selling off her bits and pieces. Let’s suppose I bought a bockety antique table from her for €100. Suppose then that today, having done nothing to improve the table, I sold it on for €1,000.
I’d have done well, would I not? I’d be thought of as enterprising. In a free market economy in a free country – ‘a great little country to do business’, at that – I might discuss the transaction without shame. Certainly there would be nobody getting up any laws against me.
As it happens I wouldn’t do anything of the kind, having (and I know this is weird) an almost mediaeval-style distrust of merchants and usurers and the like. But what in mediaeval times was condemned as avarice the modern world calls enterprise.
Buying low and selling high is the foundation of all commerce, from your net of oranges to your stocks and shares to your antique table of dubious provenance. Greed is good and all that.
But suppose I bought a ticket for Britney Spears in the 3Arena next month and then, unaccountably, had a change of heart about Britney. Am I encouraged to flog my ticket at a profit? I am not. In fact a phalanx of parliamentarians will be getting in my way.
The Government this week approved legislation outlawing the sale of event tickets above face value. Apparently the need to put a stop to ticket touting was so obvious and so pressing that the measure achieved bipartisan support. Fine Gael’s Noel Rock and Fianna Fáil’s Stephen Donnelly have both had their shoulders to the wheel on the matter, and now Enterprise Minister Heather Humphreys has made it a runner.
Humphreys’ thoughts on touts were quoted as follows: ‘It’s wrong that people who make no contribution to sport or music can profit from the resale of tickets for sell-out matches and shows.’ Interesting thoughts, those, from a woman who has clearly never heard of the stock exchange.
Under the principles of a free-market economy such as our own, the price of a commodity is controlled not by the state but by the laws of supply and demand. A net of oranges will fetch whatever someone is willing to pay for a net of oranges, and that is determined by how hard it is to come by oranges. If oranges become rare, only the rich will be able to afford them. Oranges will become a sign of status, like trophy dogs or subdermal fillers. Apparently we’re all fine with this, having consented to the system at some time that nobody can actually remember. And nowhere – nowhere – is the system better illustrated than in the property market. Demand for houses exceeds supply and only the rich can afford one. That’s where it stands. At the typical ‘affordability’ rate of two-and-ahalf times annual income, and with a national average wage of €45,000, it’s a wonder anyone at all has a roof over their head. But demand is such that you can advertise your house at €500k and hold out for €700k, and if you find the market will bear €700k, you needn’t expect anything by way of crossparty opposition.
Indeed you can buy a house one year and flip it for a profit the next, without having done anything to improve it, and you won’t get any lip from Heather Humphreys about fairness.
It’s the same with rents which, according to The Daft Report for the first quarter of this year, are now 30% higher in Dublin than their Celtic Tiger peak. And it’s likely we still haven’t found the limit of what the rental market will bear. And on this the Government is silent apart from intermittent sounds of hand-wringing.
The difference between housing and oranges or concert tickets, of course, is that one is essential and the others are not. People can say no to what racketeering touts and greengrocers demand. But people need homes.
Isn’t it odd then, where and when the State decides to intervene in the free market? In a nutshell: concert tickets yes, housing no. What a curious form of free-market capitalism we live under, in which the demand for Ed Sheeran tickets takes moral and political precedence over the demand for shelter?