As a recurring theme on this thread the looming baseball strike represents what occurs when fair markets are sought over free markets. In baseball the players and owners seek a system that keeps all the teams on an equal basis so that average interest doesn't decline. Over the last 50 years this system has evolved into the inflexible convoluted system that exists now. It's a mass of constraints, regulations, rules, which brings about the exact opposite of the above purported intent of all who are involved.
What opposite? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, because under the fairness and balance axiom, a few teams are ending up rich while, more and more are going deeper in debt. This is the one inescapable outcome that can't be conveniently swept under the foyer rug. It won't go away and it will get worse.
To the extent that any economic entity veers away from free market capitalism and seeks fairness, to that extent it will gradually create an environment that destroys it. Part of fairness or balance or equal re-distribution, is the support of poorer teams by richer teams, but the support only causes the poorer teams to go deeper in debt. The pundits claim the poorer teams are merely being mismanaged, and that there is nothing wrong with their anti-free market system.
Neither players, nor owners, nor observers, have a clue about what is really needed. It's been so long since anyone even dreamed that a free market was the solution that they have no chance of solving the problem which will only get worse.
This is exactly the problem with US corporations. No one has learned anything from the Soviet Union except Russia. Khrushchev was right but not the way he thought. We became socialist and now Russia is burying us.
Will Tampa Bay or Detroit become the first WCOM? |
