"Why chastise that person just because he or she has a bringer policy? Is that the type of person you really want to wage a campaign against?"
It is wrong for promoters or any employer (and all promoters are employers and I have yet to see one that that tells open spots upfront that their participation holds no hope of future employment) to ask people you don't know to do unpaid manual labour for free.
This is my policy and that of the CRAPP. It is the single core value of it. A lot of time was spent debating the core value of the CRAPP and this is the single idea most people wished to subscribe to. It is not a hard concept to grasp. It is simple. Really either the whole concept is nonsense or it isn't. You either agree or disagree with the whole concept. There are no shades of grey ...although how people respond to the idea is down to themselves as individuals.
You can keep trying to pick holes in it to the crack of doom, but personally I do not believe anyone runs a gig to "put something back". I dont. People who object to the CRAPP witter endless about the selflessness of others but really there is nothing selfless about gigging or selfless about running a gig. By definition they are activities born of the human ego. If you are asking people to do unpaid labour for you they are doing the giving - not you. Yes, I believe it really is that black and white. The CRAPP is an organsiation outside social class it does not care what "type of person" it condemns ...it states what it thinks is right and what it thinks is wrong and is based on old fashioned socialist values of the kind that brought the NMW into existence in the first place. It is a single issue pressure group that believes a single creed. If you do not a agree with it you are welcome to laugh at it. I do not care. I am too old to worry about looking silly. Besides which it is a bit rich to say after arguing your fatuous points all day on here that you are "above" the nasty arguments that go on on places like Chortle.
You can spend as much time as you like trying to pick philosophical holes at the fringes of the CRAPP philosophy but the truth remains and will remain eternally that the CRAPP changed things. It changed the way people think and it succeeded at least in killing off the odious practice of people running bringers to which the paying "friends" must pay. This did not happen by accident. It happened by organisation. At the very best saying non-free entry bringers are okay would be legitimising a practice that is utimately bad and would be a stepping stone to pay to enter bringers. The world is not full of all these selfless people who would run bringers not for profit. And neither in my experience is the world full of people who are happy to bring mates to gigs as a condition of playing them whether they have to pay entry or not or their owners are "selfless" or not. The catechism of the CRAPP stays as it is I'm afraid. I'm too old to care if people think it is silly.
"I wouldn't think twice about making it a free bringer if it helped me get a decent crowd in. Budding comics always have the option to go elsewhere if they don't like it"
If everyone else ran bringers we would have to too - to compete. This is the truth of it. We do not operate in isolation to the rest of the circuit. Of course if everyone ran them it would be quickly unsustainable but who cares about that... The idea that open spots have a "choice" to go somewhere else is not true. If the majority of people ran this way, the majority of promoters would have to run bringers. Including me. This is the point. It's your world and your society but this premise is a fiction. Why should I offer them a "choice" that you deny them and why should I continue to offer no-strings gigs while no one else does?
I'd have to be a mug to do that.