Bread and Circus part 1.

I recently had a discussion with some collegues about sports, and more specificly the wages Football (soccer for the Americans) players get. Now while I do agree that its the market that rules their salaries due to ticket prices, jersey sales and other sources of income. I also maintain that there is no reason why a Football player should make say $40.000.000 a year. I don't care how good they are, how many shirts they sell etc, there is no way that a Football player any football player should be paid more than an AIDS or Cancer researcher, unless that football player can cure cancer or AIDS.
It's an insult to our place in  the world as a species that the Roman Colleseums where gladiators killed each other for freedom, glory and honor, has become a spectacle where 19year olds are offered 10x the salary of a doctor, teacher, police officer, nurse, with 10+ years of experience in their fields.

Now my stance on it is that yes the market dictates what a player is worth, however there is such a thing as the market being wrong. Take the subprime mortage issues, the lawsuit filed against Goldman-Sachs, the criminal behavior of countless analysts and investment banks when it comes to manipulation on the stockexchanges. I still think that we need a stockmarket, we need banks, we even need bankers, but we can regulate them a bit. To a point where if I ask my broker "should I buy X stock" or if my broker calls me and goes "I want to recommend X stock" they should have to be truthful. Lawyers, doctors, etc are not allowed to blantantly lie to their customers, why should banks be allowed to?


We need professional sports to entertain and distract the masses from reality so to speak, but we don't need 19 year olds with salaries of over a million a year. At 19 a gladator prospect would be in "Gladiator School" being beaten the crap out of.  
What people tend to forget though is that in the Roman era of "Bread and Circus"  every other day was a public holiday, most people lived well below the poverty line and relied on state sponsored handouts of grain to feed themselves. The narrow streets of Rome were filled with people in cramped apartments, no jobs since most of the work were done by slaves for free and most of them surviving through some form of dodgy business.

We are not in that society anymore and quite frankly it makes me want to puke to know that in 2008 the National Cancer institute spent about $600 million on Breast cancer research, where the New York Yankee's alone spent about $210 million on their payroll. 
I mean how can anyone justify spending more money on sports than research into cures for diseases? How can anyone justify that a 24 year old who never finished high school makes more in a year than some of the best doctors in the world?
I mean if it was true gladiatorial combat, I'd think the wages were fair, since most gladiators didn't live past their 10th fight, and then you can understand having to take care of a family after you're dead. I've never seen Man-U look to the richboy seats waiting for the signal on whether or not they played well enough to live.

Quite frankly when I used to watch Football, I felt like some of the players did deserve to be punished for being shite.  Look at Gasgoine, he spent his career drunk of his ass and flying high on coke, with some women beating in between and sometimes during, yet he was never truly fired.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I love a good free market economy, it's just that we haven't seen one yet. We will imprison someone for years if he commits an armed robbery, but if Goldman-Sachs swindles their clients out of billions they are never really convicted for it. I mean if some black ghetto dude robbed someone for 1 million it would be an outrage, when a huge investment bank manipulates the stock market, trick their clients into bad stocks,

To be continued soon.