Raise the price of cigarettes and people don’t quit smoking. They buy their smokes from the guy in the back alley with a duffel bag full of Marlboros. That’s the reality in Australia right now. The tax man thought he was going to nudge people into clean lungs and longer lives. Instead, he just created a booming black market.
And it’s not new. America tried it with booze. Prohibition was supposed to turn sinners into saints, but it made millionaires out of gangsters. The War on Drugs? Same story. You criminalize a behavior, you don’t kill demand, you hand it over to the underground.
Music lived this too.
Remember blank CD levies? The government thought, “Well, everybody’s copying music, so let’s tax the media.” You couldn’t even buy a spindle of discs for backing up photos without paying a piracy tax. Did that stop Napster? No. It just made fans hate the industry more. It turned the record labels into the bad guys and turned piracy into a cultural rite of passage. You weren’t just burning a CD, you were sticking it to The Man.
And those anti-piracy lawsuits? Suing twelve-year-olds for downloading Metallica? It didn’t scare people straight. It normalized piracy. It made Kazaa, LimeWire, and torrents explode because everyone suddenly knew where to find free music. If the government and the industry hadn’t been so hell-bent on control, maybe Spotify would’ve shown up ten years earlier.
Same deal with tickets. Governments ban scalping to “protect fans.” What happens? Scalpers just go underground. Paperless tickets, ID-only entry, sounded good on paper. In practice? Fans locked out of shows they paid for. Friends couldn’t swap tickets. And the black market didn’t disappear, it just got meaner, riskier, full of counterfeits. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster legalized scalping with “dynamic pricing.” The very thing the government said was illegal in the parking lot became policy inside the system.
That’s the lesson nobody in power ever learns: you can’t legislate away desire. You can distort prices, you can ban behavior, you can tax the hell out of things people want, but all you do is create shadow economies. You don’t stop smoking, drinking, downloading, or reselling. You just push it somewhere else.
The record industry thought it could dictate how people listen. Governments thought they could dictate how people live. And every time they try, the unintended consequences swamp the original plan.
Because people are wired to find a way. If the front door’s locked, they’ll kick open the side window. If you make the official channel impossible, they’ll build their own.
That’s the throughline, from cigarettes to booze to black market tickets. Governments and corporations think they’re playing chess. But the public is playing guerrilla warfare. And guerrillas always find a way.
destroyerofharmony 