Reply #149: Neat idea, but it still doesn't work

[Travelman]

OK, you're at the concert. It's ... hell, I don't know. We'll say that for whatever reason, you're at a Frank Sinatra concert.

Ol' Blue Eyes gets a half mil for the gig. One night in Vegas or whatever. For the sake of simple math, let's say the venue seats 70,000, and all the tickets cost $50, whether they are within touching distance of the stage or nosebleeds. The gig brings in $3.5M. Blue Eyes gets his half mil and goes back into retirement for another year. Next year, maybe he'll play Yankee Stadium and really get the fans going with "New York, New York."

We'll say that there are a total of 12 people working the backstage: sound guys, gaffers, spotlight guys, the works. They each get a quarter mil for the night's work. They can work one more concert this year before they max out. And next week, Wayne Newton is playing to a sold-out crowd. All these backstage folks will max out next week and retire for the year.

Then, maybe, another crew can come in for the N Sync concert, sold out to 70,000 former teenagers who can't let go. That crew each gets their quarter mil, and then they get another quarter mil the next week when, inexplicably, Milli Vanilli manages to sell not just one ticket, but 70,000 of them. They're done for the year.

Sounds good, right? People are making money hand over fist, only having to work a couple of weeks a year, and poverty is solved!


Or is it?


See, the problem with this is that there are other people who work at these concerts who aren't on the regular payroll. Many of them are innovators, hustling to make a buck. The guy who sells the T-shirts, the woman who hawks the CDs at the end of the show, the folks who go around and sell concessions. These folks are all there working independently, hustling to make a buck. But instead of lots of shows, now there's only one. If they don't clear their half mil, then they're back for more, but the number of concerts has dropped precipitously. They have to try a lot harder to get what the stagehand gets, so if that's the case, why bother? Just try to get on as a stagehand, right? Why in the world should these people hustle and struggle all year long when they could just be a stagehand and get it all over with in a couple of weeks? But there's still only so many shows, only so many stagehands needed. It's not like there's an endless source of sell-out crowds out there for shows. What do we do with all of the stagehands who don't get lucky enough to work two shows this year and go home? Do we just tell them "tough shit, maybe next year?"

And there are more problems. For some people, getting to see Frank Sinatra is worth a lot more to them than $50. So they'll go and spend $1000 on a decent ticket, maybe $5000 or $10,000 on really good seats. So the price of tickets skyrockets. Now it's become a hardship for a lot of people to see a concert at all, because scalpers are vacuuming up dozens or even hundreds of tickets at a time. They'll then sell what they can up to a half mil. And then, presumably, they'll somehow stop this unethical behavior of price-gouging on tickets because ... well, no they won't. They'll just take it underground. Before long, buying a ticket to a concert turns into something like a cocaine deal.



And the concert is just an example. The point is that amongst other things, this cap would create a huge black market for just about anything and everything, greatly hampering enforcement of the maximum wage in the first place. There is far less production on the whole because people just do a little bit of work and quit for the year. What happens when a can of beans is selling for $500 on the black market? Have we really lifted someone out of poverty when they have drawn the short straw of being a ditch-digger who, while making half a million dollars a year, still can't afford to feed his family because the cost of goods has skyrocketed out of control?

All this really would do is create a true two-class tier system: the haves, who get lucky enough to get a good job that pays them the max in a few days or weeks, and the have-nots, who just weren't lucky enough to win the lottery of getting to be able to work like that.