Damn Yankees...

Greetings,

Well, if you haven't heard yet, the Yankees won the World Series a couple of nights ago... again. In my lifetime, the Yankees have won 6 World Series titles, 9 American League pennants, and 15 Eastern Division titles. They have won each of those titles at least 3 times more than any other team in my lifetime. Think of that. In the last 31 years, the Yankees have been 3 times more likely to win it all than any other team.

"Wow, how do they do it?" you might ask. Well, consider this: Since 1985, the Yankees have spent an average of 86.4% more money on payroll than the average of all the other payrolls in the American League. So, for example, if the rest of the A.L. teams spent an average of $100 million on total payroll, the Yankees spent $186.4 million. As a subset of that, if you look at just this decade (in which, they've been to the World Series 4 times and won twice), they've spent an average of 135.3% more than the other teams on payroll. So, it would seem that the Yankees are able to win championships three times more than any other team because they are able to buy an all-star roster.

Now, with regard to baseball it should also be noted that:

• The Yankees don't always win. (They just win more than any other team in baseball.)
• The Yankees don't always spend the most money on payroll. (They just spend the most 76% of the time.)
• Whichever team in the American League spends the most money on payroll doesn't necessarily win. (However, in the 19 out of the past 25 years that the Yankees have spent the most, they've either won the World Series, or placed in 2nd or higher in their division over 84% of the time.)

So why have I wasted so much time compiling these statistics? Do I really care that much about baseball, or am I really that resentful of the Yankees?

No. The reason I am bringing all of this up is that I've realized that the Yankees' dominance over the American League (if not baseball in general) is a beautiful analogy to the imbalance of the American Capitalist system. No, this isn't going to be another one of my rants about the terribly unjust distribution of wealth in the world. And it's not going to be a rant about how nobody (not even A-Rod) is worth $32 million a year. Instead, I'd just like to juxtapose Major League Baseball, which doesn't have a salary cap, with the NFL, which implemented a salary cap in 1994, and draw a parallel between our current capitalist system (based mainly on Adam Smith's ideas) and what I believe would be a better system of capitalism (which would be more based on the John Nash idea outlined in "A Beautiful Mind").

Now, first off... I want to make it absolutely clear that I am NOT an economist, nor have I even taken a single economics class. The only things I know about Adam Smith or Karl Marx are the little bits and pieces I remember from high school history and what I've heard on movies or TV news. Because of this, I won't be going into any specific theories very deeply, but will rather just bob along on the surface.

From what I understand, we're continually evolving our version of Capitalism from an originally unrestricted system called "laissez faire" which loosely means "anything goes." in this original system, any way that you could find to make money was good. The market was completely unrestricted, which meant that it would have been heaven for the Bernie Madoff's of the world. No matter how you made your money, the important thing was that you made a lot of it. Adam Smith thought that this would be good because it would force competition and ingenuity. I think that he failed to take greed into account.

In the early 20th century, the US government decided that it might be a better idea to start regulating businesses a little bit to ensure that workers weren't being abused, and to ensure that no one specific company got too big and powerful. So it created labor laws to protect employees and anti-trust laws to ensure competition.

Now some people might say that I can't use MLB as an analogy for our current capitalist system because the Yankees are obviously a monopoly and that our anti-trust laws would stop an organization like that from getting to where the Yankees have gotten. If you look at the overall stats in baseball, though, the Yankees always have plenty of competition when it comes to payroll. There are several years in which the Boston Red Sox, Oakland A's, or L.A. Angels have spent either more or almost as much as the Yankees, and all of those teams have won quite a bit, too. So it's a lot like our current system. You have a handful of companies that make all the money (win all the games) and everyone else just kind of clamors for whatever piece of the pie they can get.

What I would like to see, is a system of capitalism which more resembles the current NFL. I didn't do any kind of a mathematical breakdown (I got really tired of crunching numbers), but at first glance, the history of the Super Bowl can give us a lot of insight into the two different systems. From 1967 - 1993, there were a relatively small amount of teams that made it to the Super Bowl, with a lot of those teams seeing multiple appearances (Packers, Steelers, Cowboys, Dolphins, etc). We called those teams dynasties, just like we call the Yankees a dynasty. Since the salary cap was implemented in 1994, however, there have been a larger number of teams in the Super Bowl (in a shorter amount of years). Even more revealing than this, is the fact that pre-1994, 13 of the 19 teams to reach the Super Bowl made multiple appearances, and 9 of those 13 teams went more than twice! After 1994, that ratio went to 6 out of 21, and only one team since 1994 has been to the Super Bowl more than twice.

So the bottom line is that after the salary cap was implemented, the Super Bowl became a lot more diverse game. The playing field became a lot more even, so to speak, which means that the salary cap did what it was designed to do.

How do we relate this to the American economic situation? Well, what I suggest is that we regulate things a lot more heavily. "But Reverend," you say, "the government already regulates the shit out of everything! Beside the fact that they can't do ANYTHING efficiently! Surely that can't be the answer to our problems?" Well, I think we need to do a bit of revamping of the government first, and then we let them regulate more.

The problem with government regulation currently (as I see it) is the fact that the people who make the regulations each take millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the very businesses they seek to regulate. In my ideal system, they government would provide each candidate from a registered party a certain amount of public funds for their campaign. Candidates would be prohibited from taking any private money. The only money/advertising that they could use for their campaign would be what the government provided them. In this way, the playing field would be level for each election, and the candidate with the ideas that best represented his/her constituency would theoretically win. Then, once in office, the only re-election concerns the candidate would have would be his/her job performance. Through transparency, the constituency could see exactly what each representative has done, and because the power of special interests would be virtually eliminated, laws would be made to benefit the people as a whole, rather than the corporations that control the group.

It's like I always say: If I were in charge, things would be different.

I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.