People work to make money so they can buy goods and services, which are made by other people who are working so that they can buy goods and services. That's the foundation of I think every economy on the planet with the exception of maybe North Korea, not really sure what's going on over there. Different jobs paying different incomes then acts as a bounty to draw people to do things they otherwise wouldn't and that there aren't many people willing or able to do. Higher pay lures people to spend longer in school, to go work somewhere terrible to live, to sit in a cube all day, which then benefits us all in the form of more consoles and tickets to buy.

Removing pricing as a way to determine who gets scarce goods and replacing it with random chance undermines this. Why spend the extra years in school to be a nurse instead of a wards man? Why spend the extra years to be a doctor instead of a nurse? Why spend the extra years to specialise instead of being a general practitioner?

And that's just replacing it with random chance. Replacing it with a system where what you get depends on your ability to be available the minute something is released, or to line up for hours, or to drive from store to store, is far worse. It now doesn't mean what you get is detached from how much you participate in the workforce, it means working a lot, or at something hard or important actually decreases your change of getting a playstation or Taylor Swift tickets.

Then separately there's also people liking things to different degrees and the determination of who gets which. If we both earn about the same about, you're a massive Taylor Swift fan, I think she's pretty good but nowhere near as good as Crash Bandicoot, and you don't mind playing a game every now and then; then in a world where we're both in the market for some entertainment and there's one Taylor Swift ticket and one PS5 available, you should get the ticket and I should get the PS5. If those are distributed by price, that's very likely to happen. We're both likely to be willing to outbid each other for our preferred item and be happy with the result. If it's determined by "log in at release and hope for the best" then there's only a 1/4 chance that's the outcome. Its more likely to be one of; I get both, you get both, or we each get our less preferred item.

So on one level that's why I'm in favour of people taking things distributed by chance and distribute them by price instead. However I don't think anything I just wrote would teach any reader who has been through high school anything. I don't think it will cause any revelation. I think most people would agree with me for most other goods and services. Hell there are many (majority?) of straight up socialists who want to use income and price to allocate who gets what, they just don't want to leave the income and price determination up to the market or let you use that income to purchase means of production.

Which means the question is "why do I feel the same way about tickets and consoles that I do about basically everything else that is bought and sold; when many internet commenters don't?" and I think the best answer is that I did not grow up middle class and I do not have middle class sensibilities. People who can spend $300 or $1300 on a concert ticket are both decently well off as far as I'm concerned whereas I think many of you can put yourselves in the shoes of the former and see the latter as rich. I have no strong conviction that recently released consoles and brand name artists should be attainable. I don't think anyone from my family or my childhood has been to a concert by a big enough name that tickets were scalped. I don't think not being able to buy your kid a PS5 is some sort of moral failing of society.

All of this is not to say I don't want the middle class to have the things they want. Again I think allocation by pricing leads to more people in general getting more things they want in general. But it means I lack the emotional impulse to think "market efficiency be damned, we need to do something about this!" on the topic of consoles and tickets like I would otherwise have for homelessness, people working multiple jobs to stay afloat, etc.