Thursday, February 2, 2012

Our Socialist Super Bowl


Martin Bashir pointed this out.

You might have noticed that in professional baseball, the same teams seem to win each year, the teams like Boston and the Yankees. They have the most money. Pro football is different. In football a team like the 49ers can be among the worst one year and among the best the next year, thanks to a form of socialism.

In 1994, the owners' and players' associations of the National Football League approved a salary cap. This cap is essentially a set amount of money that each of the NFL's 31 teams is allowed to spend on player salaries for the year. I don't know the real figures, but let's say that for the last season, the total amount of money available was $800 million. Divide that by the 31 NFL teams, and each team got to spend about $26 million. To oversimplify, each team gets what it needs; they start off even. Baseball represents the opposite theory: capitalism. The New York Yankees bring in a ton of money, so they get to buy the best players and pay them four times what a team like Oakland can afford. The Yankees hold the record for winning the most pennants. That's why rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the Bank of America.

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