baseball-cards

I have to talk about
something cool we did today for my economics class.  Went on a
field trip today for my macroeconomics class that was meant to show us
in very concrete terms how a nearly free market works on a small
scale.  We went to a sports auction in the city where they
were selling different kinds of sports memorabilia. 
Basically what the teacher was trying to show us by bringing us there
is how a group of people buying and selling something, a market, will
work out different types of deals with very little outside
regulation.  The only regulation here was the general value of
appraisal that are put on each card.  These appraisals are
very loosely watching as barters often go around those values depending
on the particulars of the trading.  It was especially
interesting to watch the deals that went on around the rare trading
cards which were always done very carefully and everyone made
very carefully calculations and paid very close attention to the
appraisal values because they could be trading cards worth thousands of
dollars and didn't want to get screwed over.  It was also
interesting to see the different ways in which cards were treated
depending on the sport.  I didn't know that there was such a
large market for basketball cards or baseball cards
because I had always only collected the football cards
when I was kid.  Today I saw people trading single basketball cards for
upwards of a thousand dollars each.  I think our teacher
really did a good job by picking such a cool example for all of us to
see. Some students had no idea what a bartering system actually looked
like and how much skill and wit it actually took to get what you wanted
out of a deal.  Even though they were trading something that
had very little national recognition, these guys were so serious about
their business because it was their livelihood.  I think that
was what made the illustration so accurate because these guys weren't
acting, their lives were riding on these cards.