House flippers and scalpers are two sides of the same dirty coin. Both take something of value to a very limited audience, artificially insert themselves into the transaction, bump up the price, and take a cut they have no business taking.

House flippers take a house with imperfections, in which they have no interest, so real house hunters can’t buy it at a legitimate price, and wallpaper over the imperfections to hide them to the buyer. Then they put it on the market and sell it to the highest and most unsuspecting buyer they can.

Scalpers buy tickets to a show in which they have no interest so that the real fans can’t buy them at face value and then turn around and sell at an artificially inflated price just to take an undeserved profit.

While I’m as big a fan of capitalism as one can be, this is one of the flaws in the system.

Although, I guess it’s not a flaw in that it helps us tell the good people from the bad.