From CNN.com:
Interest in President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration is running so high that one ticket broker is asking $20,095 for a single ticket.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the inauguration committee, said Monday she she was prepared to ask Congress to make it a crime to scalp inauguration tickets.
“We have heard reports that there are people trying to scalp Inaugural tickets for more than $40,000 each. This is unconscionable and must not be allowed,” Feinstein said in a statement.
Despite Sen. Feinstein’s misgivings we must remind everyone that re-selling these tickets is not a crime. While it would be nice to provide free tickets to anyone who would like them, this is obviously impossible, if nothing else due to the sheer number of people interested. There is also the fact that these tickets are in limited supply and with high demand, making them valuable. It is only natural that they, like lodging in DC over the inauguration, should be traded in a market.
Inauguration tickets are reserved through members of congress (working through the Presidential Inaugural committee). Therefore, any person who wanted a ticket could call their local representative and ask for one. Those who did will be receiving a free ticket. Those who did not will be paying market rates for them online.
If tickets were offered for free and then not allowed to be resold, scalping would still occur only it would not be through Ticketmaster or eBay, but rather through criminal entities, which would also result in fraudulent and non-existent tickets being sold. An event like this inauguration would undoubtedly have its fair share of interested people, no matter what the source.
It might not sound nice, but for most things in life you don’t get the option of receiving something for free if you’re early. So this system is actually more egalitarian than most.
