{"id":1364,"date":"2009-10-15T02:02:33","date_gmt":"2009-10-15T06:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=1364"},"modified":"2009-10-15T08:43:11","modified_gmt":"2009-10-15T12:43:11","slug":"forget-health-care-what-about-socialism-in-the-nfl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/1364\/forget-health-care-what-about-socialism-in-the-nfl\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget Health Care … What About Socialism in the NFL?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh’s expulsion from the group attempting to buy the Saint Louis Rams<\/a> has garnered a lot of press coverage today — most of it from those embracing the politics of partisan indignation.<\/p>\n

As a man of the right, I take no small umbrage at politics intruding where it doesn’t belong, and professional sports is one of those areas. As a matter of principle, Rush’s bid for the Rams shouldn’t matter any more than it would if Al Franken was trying to get a share of the Vikings or if Maureen Dowd wanted a piece of the Jets (which I would really, really like to see).<\/p>\n

What’s getting lost in the shuffle, however, is how much the Limbaugh expulsion reflects that professional sports in general — and the NFL in particular — operates in an unfree market.<\/p>\n

Remember that professional sports leagues are essentially cartels, restricting membership and raising bars to entry. Heck, Major League Baseball is even exempt from federal antitrust laws.<\/p>\n

In the NFL, this empowers as few as nine of the 32 teams to block the sale of another. To have an atmosphere of such limited competition and<\/em> to have your competitors empowered to veto your ownership wreaks of an inefficient and dysfunctional market.<\/p>\n

Rush got the boot for essentially political reasons, but maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, that champion of capitalism would end up with equity in a system that essentially looks like a medieval guild.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh’s expulsion from the group attempting to buy the Saint Louis Rams has garnered a lot of press coverage today — most of it from those embracing the politics of partisan indignation. As a man of the right, I take no small umbrage at politics intruding where it doesn’t belong, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[295,102,294],"class_list":["post-1364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-football","tag-free-market","tag-limbaugh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1364"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}