they should be paid less because the system doesn't need to pay them that much.
What mechanism would you use to lower their pay?
Not really sure. The point is they could be paid less, and many if not most would still pursue athletics and entertainment as a career. How to lower their pay, I'm not sure. For entertainers it could be done by weakening intellectual property laws about digital piracy so that bootleg DVDs/CDs would be more legal - perhaps everything digital would be in the public realm within a year after release? Boom, there goes artist's main income generation stream, and would lower their pay, as well as lower the cost of DVDs/music for the rest of us. As for athletes, the NBA could just implement salary caps on players. Maybe there are three tiers of pay, $80k, $120k and $200k, with only players with X years of experience elligible for the higher levels.
If baseball player salaries are capped at (I don't know the number, say $150k), there will still be millions of athletes that will pursue the job.
There aren't millions, or even thousands, probably not hundreds, of people with the talent to play at the highest level. There are millions, maybe many millions of people who can play decent baseball (or football, or basketball), and thousands who can play extraordinarily well) well, but only few who would legitimately rank among the very best. Teams bid on that scarce commodity. And you can't make up the difference by hiring 1000 players with AA potential, as only so many players can play at the same time.
History proves athletes will still play at high levels with low pay. 80 years ago pro sports players made peanuts and Babe Ruth did fine. If the max salary in the NBA was $160k, you are still going to have loads of high school kids wanting to play in college, and loads of college kids wanting to play in the pros (rather than become meat packers). If athletes salaries were capped, the number of college athletes that would choose to go into the pros if they got the opportunity would probably be ~98% of what it is now.
As for how to avoid all the cost savings being passed on to the team owners, not really sure, but it should cause a decline in ticket prices. If the Yankees payroll went from $200 million per year to $5 million one would hope tickets prices would come down. This whole idea sounds like it would have to be imposed by government since no one is going to get player salaries down without an outside mandate.
As for entertainers, if copyright law for music/film/TV were weakened significantly, the lower cost would flow through to the consumer naturally. And actors, writers, singers are still going to pursue their craft, but the wealth motivator will be much less. It might free us from the talentless money hungry Jessica Simpsons of the world and leave us with the Becks that have talent and would (hopefully) try to make good records even if it didn't make them millions of dollars. |
