We have had several weeks now of overhyped if not entirely phony news.
It is a peculiarity of the way that people think about ideas, as opposed to practical things, to assert values without limits. In practical terms most people understand that if meat tastes good cooked at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, it will not taste better if you cook it at 800 degrees for 60 minutes. In practice most people understand that if food tastes better with a little bit of salt, it will not taste twice as good with twice as much salt, or four times as good with four times as much salt. Most people understand that if eight hours of sleep are good, sixteen hours would not be twice as good, and that if sleeping under two blankets is good, four blankets would not be twice as good.
When it comes to ideas—about baseball or politics--people rarely understand this. In politics it is customary to assert values as if they had no limits. We have reached the economic snaggle that now confronts us, in my opinion, as a result of economic principles stated without limit—one by each side. In the 1980s, 1990s and in the last decade, Republicans (and some Democrats) have expressed unlimited confidence in free trade. International trade agreements are supposed to reduce costs and open markets.
Well, yeah, but the problem is that free trade undermines existing domestic marketplaces. Let us suppose that the cost of a new mattress is $900, and that the same mattress can be manufactured in Guam for $500 and transported here for $100, so that you can buy it here for $800 (with a $200 markup for the retailer.) You save $100.
Yeah, that’s great—but what happens to the people who worked in the mattress factory? What has essentially happened to our economy in the last fifteen years, in my view, is that we have moved so aggressively to reduce international trade barriers that we have unraveled the structure of domestic marketplaces within which we all lived and worked. It isn’t that free trade isn’t a good thing; it is, rather, that it is not an unlimited value.
Democrats, for their part, have unlimited faith in government spending to stimulate the economy. In early 2009, when our economy was in a terrible state and the Democrats were in control of congress and the Presidency, they settled on a huge economic stimulus package.
The problem was, an economic stimulus is a remedy for a sluggish economy. What we had in 2009 was not a sluggish economy; it was a fragile economy. We wound up with an economic stimulus package that we couldn’t afford, and that was irrelevant to the real problem.
The Republicans, then. . . and here we come to the phony news. . .the Republicans, or some sub-section of them, decided to force an economic "crisis" over what is normally a routine procedure, extending the debt limit.
As an old person, I am hung up on an obsolete meaning of the word "crisis". A "crisis" is, or was, an incident in which the life of something was threatened—a "critical" phase. Critical condition. Life-threatening. I have a hard time seeing this as a crisis, because. . .what is at stake here? The life of what?
I have this problem a lot, since that meaning of the term "crisis" no longer controls the usage of the term in public discourse. Anyway, the Tea Partiers created a phony economic crisis at this particular moment because this was the first moment that was available to them.
I don’t fault them for this. Their view of the situation is that an economic crisis is inevitable due to the Federal government’s out-of-control spending, and we’re better off having this economic "crisis" now, rather than later. I don’t disagree with that. We are better off dealing with this now, rather than later. I don’t know that this was a great moment to have this confrontation, but. . .this is where we are. What I disagree with is the perception that it’s a crisis. It’s not a crisis. It’s a. . .an impasse. A confrontation. But the perception that there was a terrible crisis created an opportunity for Sub-Standard and Worse than Poor to downgrade our bonds, which created a crazy week on Wall Street which was essentially a war between the naïve investors, who were panicked into selling stocks and buying dry goods and tinsel, and the sophisticated investors who realized that very little of substance had actually happened.
This was followed by an even phonier news story, which was the Straw Poll in Iowa. The Iowa Straw Poll bears exactly the same relationship to being elected President that being elected the Homecoming Queen in High School does to becoming a movie star. What I don’t understand is why in the world anyone would put themselves in a position where defeat in this little farm state fundraiser would wipe them out of the larger contest.
Normally, when people say "I don’t understand", it’s a rhetorical device, and what they really mean is that they think that you don’t understand, or they think those who disagree with them don’t understand. In this case, I really don’t understand. Everybody knows, I think, that the Presidential contest is not a sprint, it’s a marathon; everybody, at least, pays lip service to that idea. What Pawlenty did is like going to a poker game, betting everything you have on the first hand of the night, and going home to mama if the cards don’t come in. Why would anybody play it that way? I don’t get it.
NCAA
Let me make a suggestion to you. I think the Federal government needs to step in and regulate the scheduling of college sports. What I propose is a law, applying to every college or university that chooses to accept Federal money, prohibiting the scheduling of sporting events that occur more than 400 miles from the home campus of the college.
Harsh?
Think about it. 400 miles is a long way. The Kansas Jayhawks, to pick an example at random, would have dozens and dozens of other colleges that they could schedules games against—dozens, if not hundreds. They could play the University of Nebraska, Creighton, Kansas State, Emporia State, Fort Hays State, the University of Missouri, Southern Missouri, any schools in St. Louis, Wichita, Topeka, UMKC (Kansas City), Tulsa, all of the schools in Oklahoma, Iowa, Iowa State, the University of Arkansas. . . .dozens and dozens of schools that they could compete against. They could put together an eight-team conference and not have to repeat a non-conference basketball opponent for ten years.
The Athletic Director of the University of Kansas would squall like a stuck pig at being told that he could no longer schedule games against UCLA, USC, Duke or Texas, but the reality is that he would still have many, many options in putting together a schedule. He would have to schedule some smaller schools, yes, and it would cost him quite a lot of money, yes.
Which is the point. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Kansas is a relatively sparsely populated area. For every school that Kansas would have the opportunity to schedule, Ohio State would have three and UCLA would have five, simply because the population density is much higher there than it is in the Midwest.
OK, you would have to make two exceptions in the rules. First, for those schools which are in areas where the population is so sparse that we would in effect be limiting colleges to playing five games a year against their in-state rival, we would have to extend the 400-mile limit to, let’s say, 600 miles. Extending the limit from 400 miles to 600 would more than double the area that was covered, creating a coverage area of 3800 square miles, which should enable even the University of Montana to have scheduling options. Don’t harass me about the details; we can work that out later.
Second, you would have to make an exception to allow the scheduling of a national championship series.
This would, of course, force almost every existing college sports conference to disband. The Big 10, Big 12, SEC, ACC, Pac 10, Big East; they’d all be put out of existence. The real question is why would we want to do this?
Because college sports Athletic Directors have ceased to act in the best interests of their fans.
Look, when professional sports teams do things we don’t like, we accept that because those are, after all, private businesses with very rich owners who have invested many millions of dollars into their teams. College sports teams are not private businesses, and they are not "owned" by their Athletic Directors. Are they? Am I wrong about that?
Well, if college sports teams are not owned by their Athletic Directors, then why in the world would we allow those Athletic Directors to do whatever the hell they want to with the teams, regardless of whether the fans like it or not?
What the Athletic Directors want is to convert college sports programs into machines that will generate as much money as they can possibly generate. The A.D.’s idea of "what is good for the program" is "whatever generates the most revenue for the program over the next three or four years, when I am in a position to benefit from those profits."
What I am proposing, really, is that we assert as a nation that this is an intolerable idea. A college sports team is not simply a money machine for the benefit of its managers. It’s an extension of the University; it’s a part of the community; it is a representative of the state. Telling the Athletic Directors forcefully that they cannot do whatever they want to do is a way of seizing control of the programs away from the Athletic Directors, and making those programs answerable to the public.
Look, these people are acting as if what you and I think doesn’t matter at all. If you’re a fan of University of Kentucky, the University of Kentucky Athletic Director absolutely could care less what you think about anything. My question is, why are we putting up with that, when we don’t have to?
We put up with it because we have entirely lost sight of the fact that these are, for the most part, public institutions, ultimately answerable to public policy makers. I propose that we re-assert control over them.
That wouldn’t be the last step, of course. What we would need to do then would be to establish state boards, state by state, to govern to conduct of college sports. I would also be in favor of state laws or federal laws prohibiting colleges from selling broadcast rights to their games—in essence, forcing them to allow open broadcasting by any interested party. The point of it is to drain the swamp by pumping the money out of the system.
But since college sports are a national operation, we can’t really gain control of the problem state by state without first breaking up the national operation. I advocate seizing control of the scheduling, by federal law, as a first step to cleaning up college sports.