Your logic seems premised on the likelihood that burners will only sell their remaining ticket, instead of bartering it away for some non-cash instrument, whatever it might be (or burning it, or doing whatever they please with it).
There’s no difference, to the person who wants a ticket but can’t buy one (except from a scalper). If you buy a ticket with no intention of using it, you’re doing one or more of the following three things:
- artificially increasing demand on the primary market, thereby making prices artificially high for other people (making it harder for everyone to go to Burning Man), and/or
- forcing people onto secondary markets, where prices will be higher if supply exceeds demand (making it harder for everyone to go to Burning Man), and/or
- effectively destroying a seat, if the ticket goes unused and unsold (making it impossible for one person, somewhere, to go to Burning Man).
A nicer word for scalper is arbitrageur–someone who buys low and instantly sells high–and not all arbitrage is illegal, immoral, or unnecessary in a reasonably fair market. Scalpers can exist where they’re not wanted. But they can’t exist where there’s no demand for their services, and if “Burners” are upset about having to pay scalpers through the nose, most of the blame lies with other “Burners” who bought more tickets than they needed. (Or possibly nefarious market manipulators, but my guess here is a bunch of people bought tickets for friends who decided not to go.)
The fact that the scalper getting scalp-shamed here might be telling tales is slimy, sure, and fuck him indeed for that. But at the end of the day his profits come 99% from the fact that there are people who have tickets and don’t want them, and vice versa. You can’t say fuck him for scalping without also saying fuck the people he bought from, and fuck the people he sold to.
