Ticket Scalpers in the Market Economy

Most people will associate 1.6 billion people with the word “China.” Chinese Spring Festival, the most important holiday in the year, can make over 250 million people to use public transportation to go back to their hometown. Those people who work away from home would like to choose train as their vehicles. And they need to wait in line and spend an average of five hours to get a ticket. Therefore a few people see money for those train tickets. These people are called “ticket scalper”. Ticket scalpers usually hoard a mass of the train tickets so that most citizens couldn’t get the tickets. Thus the ticket scalpers could sell those tickets with higher prices. But this conforms to the rules of market economy. A large number of consumers who would rather spend three or four times higher than normal prices on the train ticket but not wasting five or six hours waiting in line result in the appearance of ticket scalpers. Those ticket scalpers’ primary targets are the migrant workers who are going to return to their hometowns. It makes lots of workers couldn’t go back to their hometowns, because they couldn’t afford the higher prices. In order to stop this “fail market,” the government decides to apply for the real name and ID system. Each person can only buy a ticket with his or her own ID card. This government intervention results in the decrease number of ticket scalpers, which could lead to the increase of the unemployment rate and the increase of the risks of social instability in other way, but it ensures a great number of migrant workers to go home and get together with their families in the spring festival with fair normal prices.

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