But how does this break economics textbooks? They took a public good and effectively privatized it, ostensibly for the public benefit (reducing infrastructure costs on NYE) but conceivably for private benefit (passing out VIP tickets as favors or steering a profitable security contract to an ally).
There's nothing in economics that says the optimal outcome will naturally emerge. There's the concept of equilibrium in price theory, but that only exists under conditions of perfect competition - zero exit/entry costs, absolute market transparency, and fungibility of what's traded. To parallel your firework example, that works quite well for commodities like oil or many ag products, but not for housing.
Essentially, the authors' argument is that political power can easily be modeled as transactions in a political capital market where access to public goods is traded for political support (participatory or vote delivery blocs in rigged elections, or non-interference by military actors in more obvious dictatorships). The wiki article includes a link to their more rigorous academic exploration of the topic which is almost equally readable.
