Changing Course

THE TRANSFER PORTAL has closed, and all the players have presumably landed where they want to be, or think they want to be, at least for the next year. It is now possible, under certain conditions, to play six years of college football to play until you are in your mid twenties, and make millions of dollars. The pandemic forced the decision to make up for playing time and games lost, financially. College athletics is now professional athletics but newly so, and so far,there are no rules on exactly how the system is going to work. For the time being, it works completely chaotically. Small college athletic departments do not generally rake in the millions of dollars of revenue that major universities do, and their future survival, financially, seems in doubt. Everyone hates teh current situation, and everyone agrees that it is unsustainable, and will have to be replaced bysome organization system. A high school classmate of mine fifty years ago played college ball, then played a little while in the NFL, and I told him that if he played today, he could make at least five million dollars a years in college, for at least four years. Conservative eonomics would suggest that doing nothing, simply leaving the situation alone, and let free market forces drive intercollegiate athletics economically is the best course of action, because, like every other segment of the economy, the free market always corrects itself, always naturally balances itself, and distribuet wealth where it should. Simply allow money to change hands between universities and student-athletes atlete-studensts?) however it chooses, and it will all come out in the wash. Wealthy people are wealthy for good reasons, says classic capitalist theory, and wealth is ultimately distributed fairly, in ways best for everybody. The other day the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have replaced the Yankees as the evil empire with ulimited money power, signed a very good ball player to a contract worth two hundred and forty million dollars for four years, sixty million dollars a year, to play baseball. Professional and collegiate sports is more popular and lucrative now that ever before. Of course the money in college athletics is not distributed equally. The million dollar quarterback superstar shares the same locker room with the penniless back up kicker. Offensive linemen have so far not gotten the same wealth as the quarterback,but without them, the quarterback wouldn't have a chance. But that is starting to change. If capitalism distributed money fairly and appropriately, arguably, then one percent of the population wouldn't oossess thwenty percent of the national wealth, etc. Conservatives might claim that socialism,government meddling in the economy of America, a growing trend, is the root of the problem of inequality of wealth. They also might claim that without government interfernece in wage and labor laws stifles economic growth and initiative. A more realistic analysis is that just the opposite is true. Government involvement tends to distribute the wealth more widely and fairly, and to prevent wealth and power from being even more concentrated than it already is. It wouldn't do anybody ay good if one person, say, an Elon Musk type, eventually accumulated all the wealth in he world, which is exactly what will happen if current trends continue, which they cannot. We cannot allow them to.