Encroaching Capitalism

UP AND ON THE OLDE STATIONARY BIKE before sunup, with still nary an idea about today's morning essay. No matter. It always comes to me, and lo and behold, it did again today. It came in the form of an interview on a local sports talk radio program. The guest was the CEO of a new non pforift fund raising organization, called "The Edge". Its purpose is to raise as much money as possible to pay athletes to attend our university, that our university might have highly competitive, winning, lucrative sports teams. Welcome to the N.I.L. era, name, image and likeness, also known as professional collegiate athletics. "The Edge" seeks five thousand members, and has about five hundred so far. It got off to a late and clumsy start, and, rumor has it, is far, far behind similar organizations at other major universities, who are already looking at thousands of members and milllions of dollars. Minimum membership fee for The Edge is twenty five dollars a month. Maximum is suppodesly two fifty, though its hard to imagine them turning down larger contributions. The Edge seeks to be a common man's club; rather than a rich boy's club. The young gentleman CEO made joining the club sound like the greatest honor and benefit in the world, for everyone! That, of course, is a wise approach, as well as being highly idealistic. The university will forever be looking for billionaire benefactors. Billionaire investors are much more likely to become interested in contributing if thousands of "little people" already are. Arch Manning, of the famed quarterbacking Manning family, recently completed his freshman year at the University of Texas. He chose Texas in part because by the time he arrived on campus, he had been made a millionaire by the Texas Longhorn N.I.L. club. All across America's fruited plain, teenaged college football and basketball stars are driving fancy cars, wearing fancy clothes and jewelry, and generally flaunting and mis spending their new found wealth. Superstar Caitlan Clarke of the Iowa lady Hawkeye basketball team is perhaps the wealthiet women in America, next to Taylor Swift, who isn't currently in America. You wonder how long that will last. You wonder how many average Joe working stiffs will want to send twenty five dollars a month of their hard earned paycheck to help an eighteen year old drive a three hundred thousand dollar sports car. We have suddenly been thrust into the era of the wild wild west of intercollegiate athletics. For decades universities have been making millions of dollars on the backs of student athletes, effectively exploiting them. Free tuition, room, and board is helpful, but the athletes deserve and have long deserved to share in some of the money. The solution is obviously to create and have an organized, universal system in place, a system which clearly defines the rules, and determines the distribution of athletic department revenues. Until that happens, The stuation will be chaotic, unstable, and volatile. Corruption will creep in. It already has. Even the staunchest free market neo-liberal capitalist must admit that, to one extent or other, agreed upon rules of economic activity must be in place, and enforced. Without an organized system of oversight and regulation, capitalism deteriorates into corruption; monopolies, black markets, theft of resources; the forms of corruption involving people and money are limitless. We do not want to create an elite level of college athlete, a multimillionaire class on campus. And if the average working and middle class Joe Blow, and government doesn't get involved, in one form or another, the entire process will be contolled billionaires, like everything else. Its easy to see how well that works. In a word, it doesn't.