The inconvenient truth about ticket prices

If there's anything almost as messed up, unfair and chaotic as the pricing of airline tickets, it's the pricing of tickets to hot concerts and sports events. But this is one topic where I'll have to say the Milton Friedman-type "market forces cure all" guys are right.

If you're being gouged by a scalper or a ticket broker (which is another term for "legalized scalper"), that's because the people putting on said concert or game didn't charge enough for the tickets in the first place.

I know that's hard to swallow, and especially for us baby boomers. Many people still alive right here in the Fox Valley can remember the fabled 1969 days when a Cubs fan could get into the Wrigley Field bleachers for exactly $1.

Today's Cubs raised their ticket prices by 12 to 23 percent this spring alone. That bleacher spot that cost a buck in 1969 now goes for $22 to $45. Yet seats for many games sell out the day they go on sale. To see a late-September Saturday game against a likely pennant rival, you may have to pay a ticket broker two or three or four times the face value.

Those of us who remember how idealistic the Beatles were in the '60s, when they tried to abolish selfish capitalism in the arts by creating their commune-like Apple Corps, were appalled a few years back when Paul McCartney came to the United Center and charged $85 for the cheapest seats -- plus $30 for a program. Still, tickets sold out within minutes.

Gold-rush ticket frenzy reached its zenith in December with the arrival of Hannah Montana at Allstate Arena. So many more 10-year-olds were dying to see her than Allstate could accommodate that one daddy admitted shelling out $750 on eBay for a ticket.

One solution to these inequities is the old, traditional one -- ban selling tickets at above face value. But a better solution is simply to charge "as much as the traffic will bear" in the first place.

If Wrigley bleachers sell out on the first day at $45, and fans are willing to pay $90 to a broker, the Cubs should have charged $90 to start with. If nose-bleed McCartney tickets sell out almost instantly at $85, maybe Sir Paul should have been charging $285. If Hannah Montana brings in $750 -- no, the implications of that are too horrible.

Set the price low enough to sell every ticket but high enough that hardly anybody remains who's willing to pay what a broker would charge above face value.

Yes, that would make things more expensive for those people lucky enough to draw a random number placing them near the front of the Ticketmaster line during the first five minutes a concert is on sale. But it would put all fans on fair, equal footing. And if you have to pay $285 for a McCartney ticket anyway, wouldn't you rather see all $285 going to the people who actually make the music and run the auditorium, instead of $85 to McCartney plus $200 to some greedy ticket broker?

Pricing tickets below the true market price actually creates an artificial shortage. If people know they can buy a Hannah Montana ticket for $50, then turn around and sell it on eBay for $750, half the members of eBay become amateur ticket brokers. As soon as Hannah hits Ticketmaster, they're ordering seats -- not because they genuinely want to see this pop idol amid a sea of screaming teeny-boppers but because they see screaming profits.

Let's leave the profits to Hannah.