no sports blackouts
Topics: Regulation
13 Nov 2009
From: Ervan Darnell
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I was listening to a discussion on Sirius channel POTUS this morning
about a new lobby group for "sports fans rights". Don't laugh yet, it
gets worse.
His first argument was that since stadiums were funded by tax dollars,
blackouts (not broadcasting non-sellout games) should be prohibited.
Never mind the original negotiation was predicated on a certain set of
rules that the franchise agreed to and he now wants to abrogate a
contract by legislation. It's a completely manufactured problem to
start with. Stop subsidizing sports stadiums! How ridiculous to tax
some citizens to subsidize a trivial entertainment for others. In the
long run it might even harm the citizens it's supposed to help by
shifting the consumption to a less preferred mode.
He said his group was necessary because "fans don't have a seat at the
table". What table is that? Owners have to get them to buy tickets,
fans have a huge seat at the table. It's this idea that sellers get to
just make up prices and pricing is all a conspiracy, rather than an
equilibrium between supply and demand. Minimum wage laws are in large
part a reaction to this same fallacy (that wages are arbitrarily set by
buyers, rather than sellers, in this case).
This isn't a big issue in its own right, but I thought it a tidy example
of the fallacies that drive economic thinking.
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I was listening to a discussion on Sirius channel POTUS this morning about a new lobby group for "sports fans rights". Don't laugh yet, it gets worse.
His first argument was that since stadiums were funded by tax dollars, blackouts (not broadcasting non-sellout games) should be prohibited. Never mind the original negotiation was predicated on a certain set of rules that the franchise agreed to and he now wants to abrogate a contract by legislation. It's a completely manufactured problem to start with. Stop subsidizing sports stadiums! How ridiculous to tax some citizens to subsidize a trivial entertainment for others. In the long run it might even harm the citizens it's supposed to help by shifting the consumption to a less preferred mode.
He said his group was necessary because "fans don't have a seat at the table". What table is that? Owners have to get them to buy tickets, fans have a huge seat at the table. It's this idea that sellers get to just make up prices and pricing is all a conspiracy, rather than an equilibrium between supply and demand. Minimum wage laws are in large part a reaction to this same fallacy (that wages are arbitrarily set by buyers, rather than sellers, in this case).
This isn't a big issue in its own right, but I thought it a tidy example of the fallacies that drive economic thinking.
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