Manipulating the Market

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE sells season ticket packages, expensively.The purchaser is required to pay full price for four meaningless pre season practice games as part of the package, games in which third and fourth string players replace the stars. it would be as if hit shows on Broadway required ticket purchasers to pay full price for a dress rehearsal is order to see the show. As if patrons of symphony concerts were required to pay for the concert but only if they pay for another ticket to listen to the orchestra tune up. It would be, and is as if professional baseball charged separate admissions for batting practice, fielding practice, and the actual game. which indeed it now does. senior citizen baseball fans recall the halcyon days in which fans could arrive two hours before game time and watch pregame warm up and practice free of charge. Capitalism ceaselessly seeks to squeeze ever more revenue from the product without any improvement in product quality or quality, what economists call "rent seeking". There was a time when the NFL played six preseason games and fourteen regular season games, the tickets for preseason games were relatively inexpensive, and the working class could indulge. Now its sixteen regular season games and four preseason games. Are we soon going to see eighteen and two? It would enhance revenue, and player injuries. Rent seeking has limits, imposed by the market. Eventually the well runs dry, the patrons wander away. In America, however, nearly every form of entertainment has nine lives, as creative rent seeking entrepreneurs reinvent and repackage the merchandise. it costs over a thousand dollars to sit behind the Yankee dugout. The seats are sold, but often empty, as the unconcerned corporate wealthy walk the concourse, staring at smart phones and catching glimpses of the game on flat screens overlooking concession stands. The first Super Bowl sold tickets for eleven dollars, and the game was not close to being a sell out. Now, scalpers get thousands of dollars for resales. the masters of market manipulation manipulate supply to correspond to ever higher demand, and are conferencing to manipulate the future, and us.