Via BlogKC comes notice from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch that KC area politicos are gearing up to wage jihad for pro-sports stadium pork.
The legislators truthful enough rationale is that Saint Louis area pro-sports stadiums get much more tax money from the State of Missouri than the stadium operations for the Chiefs and Royals do. Not on the table, however, is just immediately and directly addressing that by diverting some of the money spent on Saint Louis pro-sports stadiums to Kansas City. After all, that’s sure to get shot down by the St. Louis area legislative capos defending their own budgetary turf. Instead, the talk is of redirecting funds from an unspecified elsewhere in the State budget. Early opponents stepping forward tend to be the ones who are nervous that it might be their pet program that gets voted off the island.
This really illustrates pretty well, for those who pay attention, that the political process is a poor way to fund anything. Tax money is taken from you whether you want to pay or not and spent in a manner that the ordinary person, at very best, has an extremely indirect, if not illusory, voice in. The loot is divided up based on who’s got the most political mojo at the moment.
That brings us to the question: why spend tax money on sports stadiums at all?
Tempting as it is, I’m not going to say pro-athletes are overpaid. Nobody can truthfully say that because there’s no way of determining what a genuinely fair price for anything is without a genuinely free market — a picture which wouldn’t include multi-million dollar government subsidies to private pro-sports interests. It’s called the “economic calculation problem” and you don’t have to take my word about it. The best minds in economics have been explaining it since 1920.
But is it likely that they’re overpaid? Well, millions of extra dollars are injected into that industry thru political subsidies. You do the math. Considering that most of those tax dollars come either directly from or at the expense of the working class, it doesn’t take an overly sensitive person to see the whole mess as unconscionable.
Proponents of public funding for stadiums would typically respond by pointing to all of the jobs and economic activity that revolve around all of the tax money that gets pumped into publicly funded stadiums. From hot dog vendors to sports memorabilia distributors, they try to steal credit for economic activity that naturally follows the cash stolen from the people as taxes in the first place.
What that overlooks is that unknowable diffuse benefits would have accrued if that tax money had stayed in the peoples hands in the first place — generating other jobs and economic activity. Those economic benefits would be impossible to catalog precisely because they are “what would have been” and, also, would have been spread out instead of concentrated around a politically connected industry like pro-sports. Even so, we can know with certainty that those benefits would have been greater benefits because it’s economically impossible for government to create new wealth — it can only take what’s already there by force of law and redistribute it.
So what does it boil down to?
You’re getting robbed, and discredited economic ideas are used to hide that from you.
