Lambeau Field has 73,000 seats. Approximately 125,000 people want to sit in those seats 10 times a year. This means that the tickets aren’t expensive enough. The Packers could probably double ticket prices across the board and still sell out for the season. The only reason teams don’t do stuff like this is because they’d get wrecked from a PR standpoint. “The Packers are selling out to rich corporate suits.” “They’re pricing out the average fan.” Here’s the problem: there are no rich people in Wisconsin. This isn’t New York where you have (had) seven figures worth of people with seven figure annual incomes. This is Green Bay, Wisconsin; both rich people probably have skyboxes. Furthermore, making people pay the true market value is a better way to get the biggest fans in the building than letting those whose grandparents were bored on Sundays in the 70’s have tickets. People who value the tickets the most will be willing to pay the most. Unfortunately, the Packers cannot implement this system, as they’re owned collectively by the town. This system prevents them from maximizing revenue, something that is absolutely critical for a team in the smallest major professional market in North America. In the long run, this lost revenue might end up forcing the team to move, which would be unfortunate for both the people of Green Bay and sports fans across the nation.
Citi field has no personality of it’s own. Everything that makes Citifield what it is has been superficially appropriated from somewhere else. The Mets, like most hipsters, didn’t steal their ideas from the past, but instead from the neo-retro culture surrounding them. The left field wall harkens back to the Great American Ballpark and Jacobs Field, rather than Fenway Park. The right field porch doesn’t remind one of Tiger Stadium, but instead, along with the awkwardly angled bullpen, of the Ballpark in Arlington. The Jackie Robinson rotunda evokes memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers in outward appearance only, not function. The spacious entry to the ballpark is nothing like the cramped, dilapidated rotunda that once graced Ebbets field. The Ebbets club, with it’s cushioned seats, bar, and hand carved sandwich station is reminiscent of it’s namesake in name only. While it is obviously that the left field wall was meant to be a foreboding target for right handed hitters, right field gives no such sense of purpose. It juts back and forth, almost simply because it can. It is clear that the designers put such kinks in the design of the wall because they felt they had to and could, and thus made it weird for the sake of weird.
The very images the Mets try and play off of evoke a feeling of nostalgia for baseball fans only because they were once unique. Tiger Stadium needed a short porch in right field and Fenway park a high wall in left because of the constraints of a city block. The Mets had no such limitations when building their new park in a parking lot on the outskirts of New York City. These features, while outwardly cute, will lose their charm, and cause today’s crop of cookie-cutter retro parks to meld together in our minds, much the way that multipurpose stadiums did as the twentieth century came to a close.
It’s an embarrassment that the Mets market themselves as somehow being a continuation of the Dodger legacy. The Mets are the incarnation of the very idea which forced the Dodgers out of town. The Mets are what O’Mally refused to let the Dodgers become, and it was New York’s public leaders who decided that they would rather have what would become the Mets than the Dodgers.
It’s almost as if the Mets are trying as hard as possible to forget their own tradition. On the façade of the press boxes at Shea Stadium were the words “Believe,” “Amazing” and “Miracle” along with images of past Mets players. Although this is indicative of the idea that the Mets can’t accomplish anything without divine intervention, it does point out that the Mets, in fact, do have a history of their own. Over forty year, in fact. Yet, after all these years, they still feel the need to make their fans focus as much as possible on a nostalgic history they have no part of rather than their own accomplishments.
Don’t get me wrong; Shea Stadium was a shithole, and Citi Field is a much nicer place to watch a ball game. But Citi Field doesn’t feel like a home built for the Mets as much as a fancy new toy a rich kid gets to imitate his friends.
In his recent article about the NFL’s attempt to be considered a single entity rather than a collection of businesses, Lester Munson states that if the NFL wins its Supreme Court hearing, the owners of teams in the various professional sports leagues will have the opportunity to gouge fans and shackle underpaid players to contracts. To sum up his stance, fans will pay more for an inferior product. What Munson spews is the standard rhetoric we’re told about monopolies: when a private entity is able to achieve monopoly status due to its size and power, it is effectively able to charge customers more and pay employees less due to a lack of other options for similar products. The problem is, the leagues can manipulate neither supply nor demand in order to achieve this, and pricing their products above equilibrium will only lead to them having a surplus of their product. Considering the leagues a single entity from a legal perspective will not make fans willing to pay more for tickets, or sponsors willing to pay more for advertising. Any increase in prices will be the result of increased interest in the sport. This is only an attempt by the league to centrally market and direct the league in an effort to more effectively increase interest in the sport as a whole. If sports become more expensive, blame only your fellow fans who have shunned other entertainment options to increase demand.
Another point that Muson makes is that the players and coaches will be “exploited” by owners who seek only to maximize profits. It is, however, not in the best interest of the owners to pay the players too small a percentage of revenues or restrict player movement. The more players are paid, the more resources they have to devote to striving for greatness, and the better they perform overall. The more talented players are, the better the product is, and the more fans watch. Secondly, not compensating the top performers will drive top athletes away from the sport. Athletes make tons of sacrifices on the way to becoming a professional star. If there is not a significant benefit for the risks athletes takes along the way, fewer top athletes will take those risks. Thus it behooves the owners to pay the players what they’re worth. Players will also not be shackled to their existing teams, a la baseball through the 1970’s. Sports today are followed intensely year round, as the hot stove action during the offseason is followed as intensely as what happens in the actual games. It would be asinine for owners to squelch player movement in order to save some money, essentially directing interest away from their sport while the games are not being played. Finally, increased player movement increases parity. Baseball was dominated by a few teams until free agency came into being. The NFL today is so popular in part because every fan can reasonably expect that their team will be competitive each year.
Most importantly, the individual sports will not become monopolies. Everyone who contracts with them will do so voluntarily, both the fans and the players. To reiterate my original point, no sports league can force people to wish to consume their product, be it in person, on television, or on a web source. True monopolies, such as the postal service, use the government to force out potential competition. At least one of the leagues will see this as an opportunity to raise prices and restrict access in order to make money. Taking that idea too far will alienate fans and leave potential money on the table, to be scooped up by the leagues which do a good job balancing central control and accessibility. Most sports fans aren’t permanently attached to a single team or league, but instead are drawn to whatever piques their interest at a particular moment. It is these casual fans that the leagues are always trying to capture, and those who will ignore the sport if a league mismanages itself.
Munson’s article is an example of ESPN shunning critical analysis in favor of populist rhetoric for people who’d rather have their thinking done for them. Sports fans tend to generally be fearful of change, and anti-monopoly rhetoric is deeply ingrained in most people. I guess being outraged at the very institutions which provide us so much pleasure and them their jobs is what ESPN considers now.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, James B Stewart discusses why he think tax evaders are scoundrels who deserve whatever punishment they get, and some. The people who evade taxes have not done anything wrong because they have not aggressed against anyone. The taxation itself, the forcible taking of money, is the aggression which is initiated. Those who are harboring money in tax havens are simply attempting to avoid as much aggression as possible. This is akin to putting your hands in front of your face in an attempt to lesson the blow of an assailant.
Mr. Stevens has the idea that avoiding taxation is immoral, as we all have a duty to society. To avoid paying taxes, I assume he reasons, would be akin to theft. To a point, this is true. If one were to consume public goods such as police, military, and fire protection or use roads while refusing to pay, it would be reasonable to conclude that they are attempting to game the system in order to use the resources of their fellow members of society. Once the state moves beyond this, it is using it’s monopoly on legitimate power to serve its own ends as opposed to those of its members. I can virtually guarantee that none of the people mentioned in this article pay less in taxes than they consume in public utilities. Most of their money is taken for some form of wealth transfer. One cannot fault these people for attempting to prevent having their money forcibly given to another person.
Anyone who equates the law with morality has given up their responsibility to think to the state. As the immortal Buck Strickland once said, “What’s more American than breaking an unjust law?” If the state acts immorally, is it not our responsibility to do what we can to create justice? I find it ironic that the article is titled Common Sense, as the author defends a highly oppressive state which seizes about half of our wealth through taxation. Thomas Paine would’ve found the state we live under to have more in common with 18th century Britain than the America which rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary War.
People who make their money through voluntary exchange, rather than finding favor with the government, are compensated by people who are made better by those exchanges. The more money they’ve made, the more they have directly benefited other members of society. Throughout history, the state, both here and abroad, has show a grotesque inability to use resources efficiently, and often uses what money they have to interfere with other people’s lives, thus harming society more than if they had simply taken the money and ran like a highwayman. I am not arguing for trickle down economics, but instead arguing that by holding onto more of their money, wealthy people simply won’t harm anyone. The author says that rich “owe their prosperity to this country and could so easily meet their obligations.” The rich, or at least those who have made their fortune without resorting to force, have made their fortunes because of the market economy which exists today largely because of how little the United States Government did in its infancy rather than what the government has done. It is the state which needs the market to survive and feed off of, not the other way around.
Socialism is often referred to as institutionalized envy. Stewart attempts to raise sentiment by placing his villains in places many readers will never see. I, on the other hand, commend the tax evaders on standing up to protect what they have rightfully earned. They may have inspired me to switch to a 1099 and start banking with UBS.
Up is a bad movie. For all the wonderful animation and moments when the heart strings of the viewer are pulled, it has a really poorly thought out story. What really bothers me is this idea of conservation at all costs and the immediate emotional attachment with an almost theoretical family of birds. Carl meets his childhood hero, and has an opportunity to help him achieve his lifelong goal. Instead, he not only eschews his opportunity to help his hero reclaim his tarnished fame, but also attempts to kill him. Muntz does initiate the aggression, but this does not alter the fact that Carl could have delivered the bird to him, thus ending any desire of Muntz’s for aggression. I never got the sense that Muntz was truly sociopathic, and thus would attempt to kill Carl regardless of what he did; Muntz was presented as being singlemindedly focused on capturing the bird and returning to society with a hero’s welcome.
I have no problem with Pixar creating a fantastical world in which a man pilots his balloon powered house to South America, I’d just like the people who populate that road to behave rationally, and I cannot believe that Carl would turn his back on Muntz, risking his own life and eventually leaving Muntz to die as little more than a footnote in history, to save a single bird. Carl isn’t even attempting to save an entire species of bird.
Pixar movies are often cited as having a moral which sticks with the viewer. Up teaches that the life of a rare animal is more valuable than the life of a fellow man; something I am not prepared to believe.
I am responding to a column written by Jacob Lesniewski about whether or not panhandling should be illegal:
http://gapersblock.com/mechanics/2009/06/30/panhandling-is-not-a-crime/
Mr. Lesniewski discusses the dilemma of how the state should regulate actions on the property it directly controls, and makes a heartfelt argument as to why the homeless should be allowed to panhandle. The best (although not necessarily a good) argument for the state coercively providing sidewalks and streets rather than individual entities providing them through mutual cooperation is that streets and sidewalks are public goods which cannot efficiently be provided through the free market. If this is the case, is it not the job of the state to approximate as closely as possible what the market would provide were it not hindered by efficiency issues? Therefore, we must determine whether or not privately owned and operated sidewalks would permit panhandlers to ask for money from users of said sidewalks. Essentially, we want to figure out who would be willing to pay more: pedestrians for the privilege of not being harassed while walking, or panhandlers for the privilege of being allowed to ask people for money. I highly suspect that the demand of the pedestrians would be backed with more supply than the demand of the panhandlers, and panhandling would be outlawed. For evidence, look to the few instances of privately operated sidewalks we do have. As far as I’m concerned, pretty much every shopping mall or private development considers panhandling on their sidewalks or walkways trespassing, and attempts to prosecute those who violate their property rights. Thus, the state should outlaw panhandling in an attempt to emulate the “inefficient” market as much as possible. Of course, there’s always the answer that the state could turn the maintenance and patrol of sidewalks over to individuals and private firms, and they could make their own rules in an attempt to maximize the utility of their property. Obviously, this would have to correspond with a reduction in taxes equal to the amount that the state currently spends on taking care of sidewalks. I don’t understand the argument that sidewalks are public goods which cannot be privately maintained. It’s very easy to keep track of who uses a sidewalk, and property lines can be drawn very clearly as to the ownership of sidewalks.
Mr. Lesniewski makes it clear in the final paragraph of the article that his position is not based upon economic expediency as much as upon sympathy he feels for people “with no (perceived or real) option other than to beg for charity.” I can hardly imagine that allowing destitute people to beg for money is a true solution to the problem he sees. The way to help these people is to make it as easy as possible for them to become productive members of society, and advocating their begging for loose change does nothing but prolong stopgap solutions and hinder real discussions about how to help poor people.
Fake ID’s are an issue of contention among libertarians. On the one hand, they are a form of fraud, as the one with the fake ID is falsely presenting himself. On the other hand, fake ID’s circumvent laws put into place by an overbearing and paternalistic state, something most libertarians support. By implementing laws prohibiting the sale of liquor to minors, the state prevents mutually beneficial voluntary transactions between consenting members of society. By using a fake ID, the possessor of the ID is simply recreating the situation which would occur in the absence of the state; individuals would be able to purchase and consume whatever products they found appropriate for themselves. Therefore, using a fake idea is not only morally defendable, but encourageable.
Our economy doesn’t depend upon foreign oil. Our economy depends upon energy, and the market has dictated that foreign oil is the best way to fulfill this demand. Or has it? Back in Rockefellar’s day, before Standard Oil was broken up by the Supreme Court, America was a net exporter of oil. In 1970, coincidentally the year of the first earth day, America imported about 20% of it’s oil. Today, America imports over 70% of it’s oil. There seems to be a general trend that the more regulations the government imposes upon businesses and oil producers, the more oil America must import. Obviously, when America is importing a larger percentage of it’s oil, they are producing a relatively lower amount of oil. This means that the world supply of oil is lower-much lower in light of how much oil America consumes. Therefore, the supply of oil decreases relative to what it would be on an open market when government regulations are increased. When supply goes down without a concurrent decrease in demand causes prices to go up.
What does this mean? Where does terrorism come from? Mainly people who are annoyed that the United States is meddling with their leaders. Where do terrorists get money? Mostly, directly or indirectly, from oil money. Disregard why terrorists attack us and focus on where they get their money from. What has caused America to need to import foreign oil? Government regulations. Without the aforementioned regulations, the people we currently refer to as terrorists would have less money and less interaction with us. Is Henry De Lamar Clayton, the man who introduced the Clayton anti-trust act responsible for the smoldering hole in Manhattan’s financial district? No, but there are dots that can be connected.
Every man believes that if the state were run as he thought it ought it to be run, the result would be nirvanic.
