[savanaly]

Ok, put in that light I understand why there's a gut reaction of negativity. But when evaluating economic welfare of society, it is nearly an iron-clad rule to view all humans equally, and the scalpers are no exception. So we should try to push back against our gut reaction and look at it rationally.

Once we accept that the welfare of resellers matters just as much as customers, it's clear that the situation is not strictly worse with scalping.

As you helpfully tallied up there, the gains and losses of everyone involved is the same in terms of money changing hand in either case, but in the latter case of scalping, the world is richer, because in addition to the money you paid or lost, people in the world who have an NES celebrate it to the degree they like the NES. And that has to be higher for the people who won it via auction rather than blind luck.

I can see an objection coming, and that's that in the real world it's not blind luck, since often the people in a no scalping world camp out for days to try and be the winners of the lottery. But this is not a good outcome, because while this does mean that the people who value the NES most will tend to get it, it also leads to ruinous competition in terms of who is willing to spend the most time in line. The hours wasted to the line have to then be counted as a negative in the tally and that makes that option arguably worse than the blind lotto and certainly worse than the auction.