Replies

The strike will send more fans packing; me they lost years ago. Baseball was fun because the old time players stayed with the same team for their careers. Then as a fan you could see the loyalties on both sides which made it fun to live and die with the team you rooted for (Brooklyn Dodgers in my case).

The free agency changes of the sixties began the change in baseball for the worse. And I say this without regard to legal arguments on either side, but rather a personal comment on how it made me not care about the game I loved as a kid.

OK, hold it! I couldn't care less about baseball (since hockey is right around the corner), but I have to correct something here. Revenue sharing in business IS NOT SOCIALISM! Only the economically and politically IGNORANT can say this.

As is pointed out in Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, different decision-making systems work under different organizational frameworks. Socialism (the redistribution of public and private incomes by the government) is an inefficient decision-making system for a society. It warps the profit motive and destroys the information-carrying potential of prices. But also, because it is a governmental system that is mandatory, it cannot be escaped.

Profit sharing in businesses are, on the other hand, often very rational and competative agreements. They are very frequently necessary to maximize the competativeness of a business or corporation.

For example, you may have six or seven Radio Shacks in your town owned by the same person. Are they socialist because the yearly profits are pooled into one acount? Is it socialism when, as a new store is built, the new store is subsidized by the profits of the old stores until the new store can develop a client base? Or, is it socialism to pay the employees based on seniority and not the amount of work each actually does (so a more productive person who has been there four years gets paid the same as someone less productive who has also been there four years)?

All of the above are cases where collective agreements make good business sense, due to the need to take temporary losses for long-term profitability (or, in the case of the workers, the difficulty of defining "productive" in a manner that will be cost-effective for the business to regulate and reward).

ONLY A GOVERNEMENT CAN BE SOCIALIST! I'll say that again, so the ecomonic illiterates out there might have it sink in: Only a government can be socialist!

What you decry as "socialism" as simply different internal organizations for a business. Perhaps that is the problem: people mistake the teams for the businesses, whereas it is really the league that is the business (that's why it needs the anti-trust exemption from Congress). Besides, how can anyone decrying "socialism" in business then support a "collective" bargaining agreement in the first place? Because neither are "socialism," so long as the government stays out of it...