And you didn't provide any argument against them being "needless middlemen". Many middlemen are not needless, like Amazon, where a value is provided that benefits manufacturers, distributors, warehouses, sellers, and buyers. Some asshole buying tickets or PS5's specifically to resell with massive price hikes is not a valuable middleman providing a valuable service. They're a leech, forcing themselves into the middle of a transaction they didn't belong in the first place to steal value from both sides of the marketplace.
HBO was a perfect example of this. Cable companies acted as the middlemen, because HBO didn't have the staff or inhouse expertise to operate a direct-to-consumer facing product. Now they do, but cable companies can still offer services that make their participation as middlemen sustainable and desirable for some consumers.
> That is liquidity where it might not have existed previously.
It did exist, only it was stolen by scalpers. They're not creating value out of thin air. They're not redistributing assets geographically to make them more accessible, or offering secondary insurance or warranties that make choosing them a smart option. They're stealing opportunities from actual customers looking to purchase a service or good, but instead are forced to secondary markets because of rent-seeking parasites.
Scalpers only exist in markets where somebody is selling products below value.
Without scalpers, the product is distributed by sheer luck like a lottery, or being well-connected and knowing somebody who has early access to the product.
You can argue that a lottery mechanism or being well-connected is more fair that having the necessary money. There are a lot of people in planned economies where everything from food to housing to transportation works that way, and they would probably disagree.
HBO was a perfect example of this. Cable companies acted as the middlemen, because HBO didn't have the staff or inhouse expertise to operate a direct-to-consumer facing product. Now they do, but cable companies can still offer services that make their participation as middlemen sustainable and desirable for some consumers.
> That is liquidity where it might not have existed previously.
It did exist, only it was stolen by scalpers. They're not creating value out of thin air. They're not redistributing assets geographically to make them more accessible, or offering secondary insurance or warranties that make choosing them a smart option. They're stealing opportunities from actual customers looking to purchase a service or good, but instead are forced to secondary markets because of rent-seeking parasites.