Professional athletes are underpaid if you judge them by their ability to generate income for their employers. Several major sports organizations have successfully locked out their players in recent years and it’s pretty clear that every major American sports league pays their players a lower percentage of the profits then they would if players were compensated in line with money they bring in to the team.

I think you’re mistaking the few teams that deviate from the larger collusion to keep costs down as evidence that athletes are overpaid, when in fact all you’re seeing is certain teams have a short term horizon and are simply paying players what they’re worth to the team in question. The players are far and away the most value added part of a sports team.

What we can tell from this is that Matthew Yglesias really hates business executives.

And incidentally, if you run your own company into the ground, who is there to pay you a new severance package? I can understand getting a nice severance package having run someone else’s company into the ground, but I have my own company and so I am deeply interested in the idea of getting a large severance payment if I run it into the ground.

Yes, that would be great improvement, if taxpayers were to group together in organizations of people with similar interests, and use that to influence decisions of the government. Then political arguments could be solved by official representatives of those unions.

There might be a problem if different groups have different views and interests, but we could solve that by giving them influence according to the number of their supporters.

But that seems unworkable in practice. You would have to measure, officially, the number of supporters of each taxpayer’s union every few years, meaning you would have to ask every person in the country which union they support. That can’t be an economic way to decide matters.

Not so much with the labour unions there, eh?

Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats.

Yes, and it has been ever so. In fact these observations don’t go nearly far enough. Our masters in every organizational sphere, including the schools, military, unions, churches, government, media and business, all conspire at every opportunity to protect their privilege at the expense of the powerless.

Power to the people.

Have a nice day!
Antti

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.

If the citation didn’t tell us, we would still know that this was written long before the age of professional sports.