Making Capitalism Work, Using Socialism

EACH OCTOBER the great American invention, baseball, makes millions miserable, and a few the fans of the World Series champion, joyful beyond comprehension. that's why we began, several decades ago, awarding participation trophies to all the children; to alleviate misery. There are those, however, who espouse the rather strange view that we must expose children to misery on the playground, lest they be unprepared fr its inevitability in adult life. the thought that it might be more desirable to alleviate, at to some extent, the misery of adult life never seems to gain mention, much less support. In a highly competitive capitalistic society, misery, like money, is compounded, as the winners in business drive out the loser, monopolies are formed just as surely as the patriots and Yankees form dynasties, and there is never a restart button, except for bankruptcy law and anti-trust legislation, which today seems to have been forgotten. professional sports, much to its credit, has not been too proud to utilized socialism as a saving to competitive balance. All pro sports have a player draft, in which the best teams get the least desirable picks in the draft, most professional sports have some sort of salary cap or restriction, baseball has a "Luxury tax"; if a teams spends too much on player's salaries, they are slapped with a heavy tax as a deterrent to runaway player salaries. Socialism, as always, saves capitalism, and the billionaires know how to use socialism to their financial advantage. Baseball players started showing up looking like world class body builders in the mid eighties, so, after reaping a healthy profit from home run numbers on steroids, the owners finally decided to crack down, and performance enhancing drugs were prohibited, and drug testing installed, to regain credibility and profit. it worked. the players started looking like human being again, rather then super heroes, and the game regained self respect. the problem was, and is, now the owners of major league baseball were telling people (players) what they could not put into their own bodies, their temples, their most intimate possessions. they had assumed the power to control the interior of their employees bodies, with the full cooperation of the players and their world's most powerful labor union, themselves. All in the name of cooperation, of "government control", of, yes, socialism. So now the question is; of all the great players who achieved greatness since the nineteen eighties and were also using performance enhancing drugs, people like Barry Bonds, among many, many others, do we included them or exclude them from the iconic coveted baseball Hall of Fame? So far the answer seems to be exclusion. In the fullness of time, baseball will perhaps arrive at the only sensible solution; a steroid Hall of Fame. And why not? For years the owners allowed steroids to flourish in baseball, knowingly, without regulation. Baseball has in the past discriminated on the basis of skin color. So, why not now discriminate on the basis of steroids?