tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2699293373755264330.post7475714682293108082..comments2023-03-25T10:00:09.691-04:00Comments on kinde words: Tony Atlas Shruggedtroyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01846187742319627525noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2699293373755264330.post-2826601476017423552009-03-24T15:10:00.000-04:002009-03-24T15:10:00.000-04:00Provocative. And I had no idea that you were an Ay...Provocative. And I had no idea that you were an Ayn Rand type of girl.<BR/><BR/>I make my points in the order they occurred to me, because I'm not capable of writing coherently anymore, only to responding, point by point, to the stimuli around me:<BR/><BR/>First, I think a lot of the respondents to that poll equate players' making too much money to the prices for seats. I used to get into furious arguments on my old message board with guys who both were smarter than I and bigger baseball fans, who insisted that there was no correlation. I think they were accountants, hooked on some bad economics. I don't care what Milton Friedman is teaching in some Chicago lecture hall, it'll be hard to convince a lot of us that our ticket money isn't going straight into players' pockets. I mean, ticket prices are up 400 percent since the 1980s, salaries are up 400 percent ... that's the kind of math even I can do.<BR/><BR/>The other way, it's just too abstract. We don't want to hear about supply and demand. How about we pay the players way less, and we keep an eye on the owners to make sure they're not quadrupling their profits, and if ticket prices *still* don't drop, <B>then</B> you can start with the elastic luxury talk, OK Professor Freakonomics? As a side note, we would also make good doctors. Our sons could come to us telling us their heads hurt, and we would tell them it was all that crap music they were listening to. If they stopped, but their heads still hurt, then we'd take 'em to the ER. Perform a little triage on them little midgets.<BR/><BR/>Never underestimate the hatred we hoi polloi have for the rich. I assume you see the parallels between this poll and the AIG mess, and are just putting a little English on it. You were always the subtle one.<BR/><BR/>The larger takeaway for me here is how we grudgingly buy the tickets anyway. Not me, of course; I almost always buy the cheapest seat, and go to about one sporting event a year. If I bought seats four rows back from Manny, wouldn't I want to grumble at him? Hell, if my wife needed a procedure and I didn't have insurance, I'd want to get into the operating theater and heckle the surgeon. And nobody ever confused Manny with a brain surgeon. Baseball never saved anybody's life. But we don't taunt Manny for whiffing when we've paid $75 to see him hit a homah, because sports are ingrained as some kind of necessary and public good. The American people completely lack the self-discipline to punish a league and its players the way you suggest. Remember how we were going to punish baseball for its last strike? Good thing Cal Ripken played every day so we had a totally rational reason for 'forgiving' everybody!<BR/><BR/>By the way, I refute your baseball/football parity chart due to the small sample size, as well as how the numbers would change if you went back three more years for each. Or are those two reasons the same reason?<BR/><BR/>"Why do you really care?" I guess I'm saying you don't, when you're at the game, and you do when you're not. And you're not at the game largely because you can't afford to go to every game, and that, I remain convinced, is because the players make too much. Ayn Rand had it at least half-right. <I>This</I> society, at least, thrives on self-interest. Look at how haughty the investment bank execs are. Total failures -- and for years; it's only that it just came crashing down now -- and acting like they're still in the driver's seat. Abstractly, you could probably get them to admit the whole thing's ridiculous, but things change when things get personal.troyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01846187742319627525noreply@blogger.com