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The Rate Setters at the Fed Should Attend More Taylor Swift Concerts
The price is determined at that level at which two parties counterbalance each other.
—Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 287
ON JULY 15, 2015, pop singer Taylor Swift performed for two straight nights at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. Globally popular thanks to catchy songs that sometimes describe past romantic relationships with the famous, Swift is one of the most important acts in music.
To properly understand the power that Swift wields, it’s useful first to travel back a little less than a month before her arrival in D.C. It was then that Apple, the creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and the most valuable company by market capitalization in the world, announced its new Apple Music streaming service.
Amid its rollout, and with the idea of luring customers away from popular competitors such as Pandora and Spotify, Apple offered a free, three-month trial. Enter Taylor Swift.
Understandably offended that Apple would presume to build a new business on the backs of the musicians who had created the music it was streaming, Swift struck back on Tumblr. “Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months,” she wrote. “I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.” She added: “We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” Swift backed up her words with a threat to withhold streaming rights to 1989, her mega-selling album released ahead of her 2015 tour.
Ever fearful of the bad PR that would blemish their new business line, Apple caved. Within hours the technology giant announced a reversal of its initial offer of free music to its early adapters. Apple promised to pay the artists for music streamed during the trial period.
So newsworthy was Swift’s response to the technology colossus that even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, the holy grail of public policy opinion, saw fit to comment with unrestrained awe. The page’s editors marveled at how Swift taught them “a good lesson about intellectual property rights—and the danger of taking on a woman who knows what she’s worth.”1
Swift also provided the world with a great lesson about credit. Economists frequently act as though cheap credit can be decreed through an announcement from the Fed of a “low” interest rate. Swift’s pointedly open letter to Apple was a reminder that when it comes to credit there’s always and everywhere a buyer and a seller.
Apple learned in embarrassing fashion that which doesn’t seem to concern central bankers, who are apparently less sensitive to ridicule. It’s one thing to declare from the commanding heights of government the supply of a market good inexpensive, but it’s the height of folly to assume that those in possession of that market good will give it to buyers for nothing. Going back to Swift’s threat to withhold songs from 1989, eager buyers of Apple Music were going to experience 1989 “scarcity” absent Apple’s reversal.
Importantly, the lessons Swift provided don’t end there. Everything anyone could ever want to know about the economy and credit is there for the taking in the example she offered. Knowledge is a function simply of keenly observing the world around us.
As mentioned at this chapter’s outset, Swift played two nights at Nationals Park. The cavernous stadium can hold more than forty thousand attendees, and Swift filled the stadium both nights. Among the attendees were my wife, Kendall, and some of her friends.
Reaching the baseball stadium proved easy, but upon the conclusion of Swift’s concert, there was a mad rush to get back home. While the Metro in Washington, D.C., serves Nationals Park, the lines to get on a train after the music stopped were endless. Word was that while the Metro would remain in service well past midnight, it would take several hours to transport Swift’s many fans.
With the Metro an unrealistic option for concertgoers eager to get home before midnight, cabs came into play as the second option. Unfortunately, the District of Columbia Taxicab Commission regulates the fares that its cabdrivers can charge. While the Commission allows for slightly higher rates during periods of heavy demand, these fares weren’t enough to lure drivers (aka sellers) into streets clogged with desperate buyers. The area around Nationals Park was a madhouse.
While this fare control clearly wasn’t working after the Taylor Swift concert, it’s long been the norm in Washington, D.C. Cabs are allowed to charge passengers extra during major snowstorms, but as anyone who has lived in the District knows, the paltry increase in rates regulated by the Commission rarely makes it worth drivers’ time to be out on perilous roads. Once again, when passengers (buyers) are most in need of drivers (sellers), drivers are not available.
Setting prices at artificially low levels to please buyers ignores that every transaction has a seller, too. Indeed, setting artificially low prices also ignores the purpose of prices in the first place. In a free market, prices are regulation par excellence.
In a free market, prices reflect not only the desires of buyers and sellers but also the weather, the news, what’s scheduled to happen next week, and so on. Prices frequently fluctuate in a free market as a way of taking into account the dynamic wants and needs of buyers and sellers. Prices in information-pregnant markets are necessary tools for bringing together buyers and sellers.
Government regulation of prices doesn’t fail because people who toil in government are inherently bad. They fail because no bureaucrat, no matter how smart, can ever divine a price that will reflect a constantly changing marketplace. That’s why government regulation of prices frequently leads to scarcity when supply is needed most. It’s impossible for an individual or a collection of individuals to know even a fraction of the information that the market is constantly processing.
As if the proverbial cab-shortage fire on that steamy evening in July needed any more gasoline, it’s against the law for cabdrivers not in possession of a Washington, D.C., cabdriver’s “medallion” to pick up passengers there. This rule is meant to protect the market for D.C. drivers, who are already unable to charge what the market will bear. But for Taylor Swift fans it meant that getting home from her concert could take potentially hours.
So, despite a great concert enjoyed by Swift’s many fans, the evening had the potential to end badly, thanks to the fatal conceit of government officials that they can successfully plan prices. Was a good evening ruined? No.
This story has a happy ending thanks to the intense entrepreneurialism that continues to define the American economy despite the barriers placed in front of this country’s dreamers. Specifically, the story ends well thanks to Uber. Founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick, Uber’s business model is rooted in the correct understanding of commerce, namely, that there are no buyers without sellers, and vice versa.
Kalanick devised an app that people around the world are adding to their smartphones in increasingly high numbers, as evidenced by a private valuation of the San Francisco company at more than $50 billion.2 Whereas it used to be that only the superrich had the means to ring a bell and summon a driver, thanks to Kalanick’s app anyone with a smart-phone can tap the Uber button and have a driver arrive in minutes.
It is said that the best way to predict how the poor and middle class will live in the future is to observe how the rich live in the present. Uber attests to the veracity of that statement. Once, only the rich had “drivers” at their beck and call;