Sharing The Wealth and Explaining Socialism, Through Baseball

WE WERE HANGING OUT, relaxing before we began our weekly gospel singing. It was going to be a light turnout, I knew I would have to sing loud. No problem, can do. Someone asked me what I had been doing during the past week, and I was ready. "I spent four days in Kansas City, watching my beloved Yankees take two out of three from a very good Royals team", said I, and, during the day, I spent most of my time roaming around the Nelson Art Gallery, taking it all in". Fired up, I chose not to stop talking. "Its really amazing what a good ballclub three hundred million dollars will buy you", I flippantly intoned. Actually, the Yankees have the third highest payroll in baseball, ranking behind the Dodgers and their crosstown rivals, the lowly Mets. I went on to give a few more facts: The New York Yankees have an estimated street (market) value of about seven point five billion dollars, annnual revenues of nearly one billion, and the slightly more than three hundred dollar payroll.(I can never resist the temptation to show off my knowledge, of anything.) Nobody knew what to say, of course. Gospel singers don't usually make good baseball fans. Then, the farmer in overalls spoke up, at least willing to give it a whirl; "Seems like there's just too much money in the world", said he...I could have responded to that in almost any of a number of different ways, from sarastic, to agreement. The ostensibly ridiculous observation wasn't as ridiculous as it sounded, so I decided to give it the limited respect it deserved. A perfect opportunity to inject a little democratic socialism into the fray, I thought, feeling a slight burst of adrenalin. Well, actually, said I, the problem isn't so much the amount of money or wealth in the world, its the way in which its distributed. In this country, for instance, far less than one perent of the population owns and control more than one fourth of all the wealth in America, and that leaves many people at the bottom ofthe economic pyramid without enough disposable income or personal wealth to actually have an impact on the economy by driving up demand, and thus stimulating production, and increasing aggregate wealth throughout society. Also, the eight richest billionaires in the world have a combined wealth equal to the bottom half of all the people on the planet, which has the same effect, of stagnating consumer spending, and economic growth. Straight out of Joesph Stiglitz (The Price of Inequality), whom I almost mentioned and recommended, but didn't. There was no need. I had explained the essence of the benefits of widely distributed wealth in a capitalistic economy so cogently, so lucidly, in a single sentence,that every gospel singing farmer at the table knew exactly what I was talking about, and they all agreed with me. This, in a deep down in the south red state where Trump gets forty percent, whether or not he happens to be in prison, and the words "Democrat, "socialist", and "cultural diversity " are synonimous with the word "satan", notwithstanding the willing participation of these rural folk in socialist programs like Social Security, Medicare, and farm and agricultural subsidies. They get around this inconvenient bit of hypocrisy by proclaiming loudly, albeit falsely, that such government programs are not actual socialism, but instead, just plain, good common sense, "progress", as one old coot of a conservative religious fanatic put it. But I have finally found the method. If you want to explain to people that not only are they already living in a socialist country, but that they really do embrace socialism, whether they know and accept it or not, all you have to do is mention a few baseball player salaries, and you're on your way around the bases, heading for home.