Shawn Regan

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Inauguration Tickets and the Failure of Central Planning

03/05/2009 Mises Daily Shawn Regan

Tickets to Obama’s inauguration were in extremely high demand. Members of Congress were each allotted a couple hundred tickets to distribute freely to their constituents with only one rule: they were to be given out for free. With no pricing mechanism for allocating the tickets, which were going for as high as $40,000 on websites claiming to sell tickets, the government resorted to its favorite form of distribution: the political process.

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