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Should we feel sorry for those people who get their pricing wrong? If there are ticket touts outside your stadium or theatre selling tickets at huge mark-ups isn't that simply because the demand for the tickets exceeds the supply at the price set?
Surely the police have enough problems fighting market forces in the supply of drugs and fighting conventional crime to be bothered with harrassing entrepreneurs in the market for second hand tickets.
How can it be right for people to buy tickets for entry to a theatrical show, festival, concert or sporting event such as Wimbledon to be stuck with something they can't use if their circumstances change? A ticket admits one person into a venue, it is no skin off the nose of the organizers if that isn't the person who paid for it originally. Am I missing something?
Touts don't make people pay ridiculous prices, they name a price and people pay it or they don't. That is the way a free market copes with scarcity. If gold wasn't more expensive than lead everybody would use it for bullets and ballast. High prices ensure that limited resources go to the people who can pay the most for them. That is what passes for fairness in a capitalist society, or rather that is how winners under capitalism define fairness and efficiency. It seems to me that just as democracy is the least worst way or choosing a government the free market is the least worst way of running an economy, at least it should be the default position unless we have a good reason to do things another way and acknowledge the inherent difficulties of ever bucking the market.
Touts could be eliminated if venues would take back tickets and sell them again, perhaps charging a "handling fee" (to either the seller, buyer or both) which could cover the costs of the process and act as a deterrent to people buying tickets speculatively. The handling fee to the second buyer could of course vary according to how scarce the tickets were.
Ticket touts only stay in business because they are offering a service. Nobody would buy tickets from a man walking around the crowd outside a busy venue if they could get the same service from the venue itself. If Wembly Stadium wanted to eliminate touts they could do so and at the same time make more profit and generate scenes for the television news if they employed an East End wide-boy to auction verified genuine second hand tickets from a booth outside the ground.