Mark Teixeira and America

I am a New York Yankees fan. 

For much of the past decade, that has meant enduring incessant whining from fans of other teams about how the Yankees spoil baseball by outspending every other team to acquire the best available players. Many of these complaints come with appeals to institute a salary cap in the interest of fairness. 

What on Earth does this have to do with public affairs? Stay with me, I'm getting there. 

Quite often the same friends of mine who argued for salary caps, luxury taxes and other forms of socialism in professional sports held firmly right-wing political views. In their minds, government was always wrong and the private, unfettered market always right — unless the private market kept their team behind the Yankees in the standings. 

Today a Met fan I know, brimming with hateful inferiority over the latest Yankee free-agent conquest (all-star first baseman Mark Teixeira) challenged me to explain why in baseball I'm a proponent of the rich getting richer (his words) but in politics I support more progressive policies. 

Well, that's pretty easy. Government and business are separate spheres. Professional sports are part of the business world, not of government. Pro teams are for-profit enterprises, not participants in some idyllic Olympiad. And for-profit companies are free to choose different strategies to maximize profits. Some focus less on the quality of the product or service they provide and more on minimizing costs. Think Wal-Mart. Others stress quality above all else, betting that consumers will happily absorb the increased costs of making the world's best products. Apple Computer and BMW fit into this category. Some plow profits back into the company to fuel future growth and others distribute the bulk of profits to shareholders. 

In baseball, the Yankees are like Apple and BMW, investing in quality and future growth. Many other teams — the Oaklands, Milwaukees, Kansas Citys and Minnesotas of the league — are more like Wal-Mart, preferring to slash operating costs and channel profits into the owners' pockets. As is the case with other businesses, there is no guarantee than any given strategy will succeed. Other teams, like the Mets and Orioles, also are among the highest in payroll because they try to employ the same approach that the Yankees do. They're just not quite as good at it. One exception would be the Red Sox, who long have been the #2 or #3 payroll team and, as much as it pains me to admit it, have been far more successful in the past few years than the Bronx Bombers. Indeed, the Yankees' failure to win the World Series since 2001 is perhaps the most powerful proof that the whiners' theory is fatally flawed. 

The point is that sports is a business. And in business, you don't see Apple deciding to pay a luxury tax on the iPhone so that the poor slobs at Research In Motion and Hewlett-Packard have a chance at first place, too. Yet that's precisely what the Yankees do, year-in and year-out, under baseball's welfare system. 

Now, what about government? History has shown us that a completely unfettered market, characterized by rational actors pursuing self-interest above public interest, will eventually cause widespread public damage. That is precisely what has happened over the past year with the housing bubble and the global financial crisis. The lesson to be learned here is that sparing, thoughtful doses of government intervention in the private market are necessary to prevent capitalism, the greatest system ever devised for allocating resources among humankind, from eating itself.  

Socialistic intervention with the functioning of the private market is most definitely not warranted, however, in the absence of such a threat to the general public. Simply penalizing the most successful competitor in an industry so that the also-rans can get their turn at first place is not just stupid, it's un-American. 

Sorry, Mets fans.