There is a good case to be made that if it weren't for the consistent pressure, sanctions and assassinations from US/Israel, the moderates would have prevailed in Iran.
The original post was talking about the scenario of third-party reservations trading marketplaces. In that scenario, reservations become financialized derivatives of the underlying supply of food at a restaurant. But this is being done in a really dumb way where fake demand is being injected to make the reservation independently valuable from the underlying.
To be perfectly clear, bots don't eat food, and we don't need a market to tell us otherwise. Even an individual having Google Duplex reserve ten tables in advance isn't going to be able to eat ten dinners. But if reservations actually cost money, then any restaurant doing the smart thing of just skipping no-shows to keep the kitchen running is now defrauding reservation holders. Capacity has to be reserved and left fallow for the sake of optionality.
Bringing this back to market terms: if reservations are so in demand that restaurants have to charge for them, why don't they just raise the prices on the actual food instead?
Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society at large.
If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.
But then you don't need to have the restaurant at all, you just need to have the idea of a restaurant that sells the idea of a booking. Someone decides they want to pay £100 for a booking at Restaurant A, which actually only exists on paper, so now they have a restaurant booking. They can then trade that booking to you for some other amount of money, if they want to make a profit on it. How badly do you want to have a booking at Restaurant A?
And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A?
Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk.
Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table.
I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start.
I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.
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