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The fees alone are one thing. But the fees that are a percentage of the purchase price are quite another. That transforms them from fees into a tax.
by teeray 3y ago
The fees alone are one thing. But the fees that are a percentage of the purchase price are quite another. That transforms them from fees into a tax.
- ryandvm 3y agoThat's an interesting distinction. You shouldn't be able to call it a "fee" if the cost that it purports to cover does not increase with the cost of a ticket.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoWhy not? Is there a definition of “fee” that dictates this? Presumably the _average_ fee is the cost to provide the service (including the profit they want to make on it). So the more expensive tickets subsidize the cheaper ones.
- burkaman 3y agoActually yes, some dictionaries (like Merriam-Webster) define fee as "a fixed charge"
- sahila 3y agoThat doesn't preclude a "fixed percentage" in my reading. It could be either a fixed percentage or dollar amount.
- lesuorac 3y agoIf anybody is curious what "a fixed charge" is, an example given by Merriam-Webster is Taxes as well as Interest. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fixed%20charge https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fixed%20charge
- lesuorac 3y agoI don't think it's good to be calling non-government charges a tax. Fee or Commission works fine here. The line item for sellers/buyers agent isn't "tax" when you buy/sell a house despite it being a percentage.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoLet's go the other way! Any of these corporate entities that control am entire vertical were produced by the centralizing logic of the US economy and legal landscape. Boeing is but the USG's plane manufacturing division, masquerading as a public company. Live Nation is the defacto ticketing provider. As government (created, controlled) entities, it's entirely reasonable to me to call this a tax.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- failuser 3y agoBoeing is not the only airplane manufacturer in US. If you look how it operates, it runs the government’s civil aviation, not the other way around. FAA has basically trusted Boeing to self-certify everything. It looks like without government interventions the only outcome is total monopolization. It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoIt's a cheap example, banks might have been better what with the obviously costly AML/KYC and bookkeeping requirements (not that these are bad, merely that they tend to centralize and concentrate actors so the fixed costs can be amortized more efficiently over a greater number of clients). Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example. More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
- ponector 3y agoThen tips are taxes as well? Fee is a fee, no matter it is fixed sum of percentage. Same with taxes - they are not always a percentage.
- mminer237 3y agoTips kind of makes sense though. Cost is generally related to number of dishes/amount of work/level of service expected. It's hard to imagine how Ticketmaster does anything more for more expensive tickets. I mean, credit card fees would be a sliver of it, and I guess fraud costs could be proportional?