One of the depressing things about being a classical liberal in today’s world is that everywhere you turn, there a rent-seeker is and a politician to satisfy him/her. You can’t escape such news – even on the sports page! Whether it is the recent renewal of the farm bill (and the more massive, perhaps the more unnoticed it goes?!), Laura Bush and her librarians, or so many other examples noted here, it is enough to turn your stomach.
Many use the common pigs-at-a-trough metaphor to talk about rent-seekers being like animals that noisily trudge up to government in order to feast on the public’s hard-earned money. However, this isn’t quite accurate: pigs eat the scraps and ultimately provide value to the farmer who pays for all that slop. Rent-seekers are actually more like fire-ants who slowly devour an animal alive for their sustenance. Sure, the ants pay a minor cost in time and effort spent getting the meal – but it is the other animal who pays the biggest part of the bill and slowly dies in the process!
But back to the sports page. As the article cited above notes, 4,000 people recently rallied in support of new baskeball palace arena in Seattle that will be funded with up to $200 million of public money. I read it as the story of multimillionaires trying to get over on the public to satisfy their ambition, personal pleasures, and bottom-line with a little help from those who have always loved when the emperor gives them games in the Colisseum paid out of state coffers. Of course, this is how the fire-ants/rent-seekers are depicted in the fawning media that sees government funding as a win-win deal. And no matter Hansen’s lofty (stated) goals - and one wonders about the unstated ones – he (and his rich friends) is trying to get the public to fund a personal interest that he happens to share with other basketball fans. Is this really what government was designed to do? Can this really be justified in any serious philosophical sense?
It can’t be done by way of economics/utilitarianism because the economic case against public funding of stadia deals is pretty solid. Here is how one review – among many – put it:
The large and growing peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas, sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial evidence of increased jobs, incomes, or tax revenues for a community associated with any of these things.
You may have thought that we had nothing to learn from Occupy Wall St..
But the Talmud, in Ethics of our Fathers, teaches: “Who is wise? He who learns from every man.”
We need to moralize this issue. These are pay-offs for billionaires. When the billionaires get more, the inner city children get less. Less money for: school breakfast, midnight basketball, job training.
Why? To pay off the billionaires who live way far out of the inner city. They live in suburban, even ex-urban palaces in places like Mercer Island. And then they pay their lackeys, their stooges, their flunkeys, their crew of thieving gangsters to go hat-in-hand and beg for moneyfrom people who are thousands of times poorer than them.
These people don’t deserve one red cent from hard-working waitresses and auto-mechanics. They deserve to be brought before the public so that each and every Seattle-ite can give them a swift kick in the ass.
Classical liberal populism. A dangerous precedent – but you are probably right that this would be one of the more effective tactics against such a grant of corporate welfare and the satisfaction of special interests. Unfortunately, a lot of folks buy the economic benefits argument. Too bad they haven’t read their Bastiat and recognize the Seen and the Unseen!
Liberal populism? Hell, I’d say it was Marxist. You may have noticed that I forwarded the theory that the state was acting as “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie,” if not the actual super-wealthy.
If I had to summarize my above post in two words, it would say “moralized stories.” Our brains are optimized to understand stories, not utility curves.
So my post was fundamentally about messaging. I’m talking about taking aerial pictures of these people’s (franchise CEOs’) houses. I’m talking about taking pictures of these people dressed in tuxedos outside of the Metropolitan Opera or after winning a Sotheby’s auction.
I’m talking about publicizing their annual earnings (from, say, a Forbes 400 list) broken down by thousands of $$$ per hour.
Why is this single mom who works full-time at McDonald’s paying taxes to subsidize that overfed, plutocrat who owns more than a dozen cars?
And in Minnesota, we just gave up a little Wilfare, just a few borrowed hundred million dollars to billionaire Zygi Wilf so that his millionaires had a place to place a kids’ game several Sundays a year. A few years ago the DF-L gave it up for the Polhad family of billionaires so the Twins would have real grass. This year, in a bi-partisan gesture, the Republicans dispensed Wilfare.
There’s your crony capitalism. There’s your corruption. There are your seeds for Marxist revolution. If, that is, the potential revolutionaries weren’t so content drinking beer and watching the Spectacle unfold in Hi-Def on their 48-inch flat screens.
The Emperor raises his hand, and bread is dispersed to the crowd throughout the Colosseum.
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