NFL Owners Embrace Randian Philosophy. Trying To Save Football from Socialism.
How Ayn Rand is wrecking football
Paul Ryan's beloved Packers were robbed last night -- because the owners are putting the "moochers" in their place
If you want to know whom to blame for the surreal officiating fiasco that robbed Paul Ryan’s favorite football team of a win last night, the answer is Paul Ryan’s favorite political thinker. As improbable as it sounds, Ayn Rand’s lunatic brand of Marxism turned on its head is to a significant extent responsible for Lingerie Football League castoffs refereeing America’s most popular and profitable sport (with predictably catastrophic consequences).
To understand why, it’s first necessary to understand what sort of numbers we’re talking about here. NFL owners chose to lock out the sport’s referees because they’re trying to squeeze an extra $4,000 in revenues per game out of their cozy little $9 billion per year cartel arrangement. Now, to a normal human being $4,000 is real money, but NFL owners are not normal human beings.
They are people like William Clay Ford, who has made two masterful investments in his life, the second of which was to buy the Detroit Lions in 1963 for $4.5 million. The Lions - one of the NFL’s least valuable franchises - are estimated to be worth $855 million today. (Ford’s first key investment decision was to be born the grandson of Henry Ford.)
Ford is one of 18 billionaire NFL owners. It’s hard to grasp what that means, but put it this way: If a billionaire lost $4,000 in his couch cushions, it wouldn’t be worth it to him to dig around for the money. To a billionaire, $4,000 is, in economic terms, literally nothing. It’s a rounding error on the balance sheet of one of the many people he pays to keep track of such details. It adds no “marginal utility,” as economists say, to his already grotesque plentitude.
But $4,000 per game adds up, you say. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not. Wrong. To a billionaire, $62,000 per year (which is what Ford and his ilk stand to lose if they get no concessions at all from the employees they’re locking out) is again literally nothing. It’s like a quarter to an ordinary person. Would you stop to pick up a quarter lying on the sidewalk? Probably not if you were in a hurry. That’s how William Clay Ford feels about a $62,000 bill.
The thing is, this fight isn’t really about $62,000 per year. Lots of people are denouncing the owners for being “greedy,” but we football fans would be far better off if the owners’ current behavior were being motivated primarily by greed.
First of all, if this fight were actually about the money, it would have ended long ago. Continuing the lockout is sheer idiocy from a dollars-and-cents perspective, as the owners are doing serious damage to the quality of their immensely valuable investments because of a fight over what is, for them, not even pocket change.
Second, greed has limits. “Principle,” however, does not - which brings us back to the true villain of this debacle, crazy old Ayn Rand. The guiding principle of Rand’s thought has been summed up well by Jonathan Chait:
She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships - that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of “looters and moochers” stealing from society’s productive elements. In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite.
This, of course, is the wacky idea that has spread like an ideological infection through American political life, and that is embraced most fervently by the super-rich Lords of Capital who own baubles like NFL franchises and the contemporary Republican Party.
Ungrateful “moochers” like NFL referees - mere laborers who, unlike the captains of industry who deign to pay their wages, have failed to climb to the top of our ruthlessly meritocratic social pyramid - need to be shown their place. Although locking the refs out and replacing them with utterly incompetent substitutes is a nonsensical decision from an economic perspective, there’s a higher principle to be vindicated here, which is that the Heroic Businessman is responsible for everything good about America, and the lesser orders had better not forget it.
That, at the deepest ideological and psychological level, is why the NFL owners are insisting on doing their best to wreck the sport, in much the same way that their political lapdogs, like the Rand-worshiping Ryan, are dedicated to wrecking the nation.
Update: Speaking of wacky ideas and the politics of free association, Ryan tried this morning to connect the fact that union-busting owners are using scab labor with Obama’s policies: ”And you know what, it reminds me of President Obama and the economy,” [Ryan] contended. “If you can’t get it right, it is time to get out. I half think these refs work part-time for the Obama administration in the Budget Office. They see the national debt clock staring them in the face. They see a debt crisis, and they just ignore and pretend it didn’t even happen. They are trying to pick the winners and losers, and they don’t even do that very well.”
Blown call sparks NFL outcry
The football referee crisis may be the only time Americans side against management in a labor dispute
After three weeks of bumbling and griping, it looks like a disastrous game outcome, rather than a grievous personal injury, may force action in the NFL’s referee crisis.
Evidence that football causes brain damage is forcing the sport into something resembling an existential crisis. But as some observers wonder whether the NFL is morally defensible, the league has locked out the referees in a labor dispute, sidelining the people most responsible for the players’ safety on the field. Instead the first three weeks of the season have been overseen by a rag-tag bunch of borderline amateur officials who are satisfying nobody.
This has led to some comic moments. Mark Emmons of the San Jose Mercury News writes:
"Some replacements have embarrassed themselves even without a whistle. One was yanked hours before the New Orleans-Carolina game last week because his Facebook page revealed his unabashed Saints fandom. Philadelphia running back LeSean McCoy said another official told him he needed him to play well for his fantasy team."
Last night with the Seattle Seahawks losing by five to the Green Bay Packers, Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson threw a last minute bomb into the end zone. The New York Times described the action:
"Seahawks receiver Golden Tate used both hands to shove the Packers’ Sam Shields out of the way - clearly a penalty, but it was not called. The Packers’ M.D. Jennings grabbed the ball and came down with it, and Tate wrapped his arms around Jennings and the ball and tried to take it away from him. One official signaled a score, and the other an interception. The replay upheld the touchdown, with the head official Wayne Elliott later telling reporters: “The ruling on the final play was a simultaneous catch. Reviewed by replay. Play stands. [A catch by] both players goes to the offense.”"
Touchdown, the Seahawks win. The overwhelming verdict, however, has been that the Packers’ Jennings intercepted the ball in the end zone. The Los Angeles Times reaction captures the general outrage:
"It’s finally happened. After three weeks of forgetting the rules, losing track of the ball, and haphazardly administering this country’s national pastime as if they were salesmen on vacation from Foot Locker, the replacement officials have finally done serious, irrevocable damage. The arrogant NFL’s middle-school and small-college substitutes for the locked-out regular officials have finally, actually, literally made one wrong call that decided the outcome of a game."
It was one of the worst calls in the history of the league, yet it might turn out to be one of the best calls if humiliated Commissioner Roger Goodell was listening to the message it sent.
Even viewers who know nothing about footballl can appreciate that the two refs on the scene are in perfect disagreement. It’s even clearer in the instant replay
A Big Deal Off The Field?
TPM Reader CM thinks we’re missing the significance of what happened last night on the gridiron …
I’m a huge fan of TPM (sort of religious about reading pretty much every article you publish), but this morning, I’m a little surprised you guys are not reporting on what is, in my opinion, a HUGE story: the Seattle/Green Bay Monday Night Football game. Normally, I would understand why something like this would not make the cut on a political news site, but if you caught the game and were around on facebook or twitter afterwards, you might have seen the significant public response over the officiating-and how all of that response is tied directly to the public perception of the fight over union rights and wages.
The prevailing conservative storyline has always been that union members are no better than non-union members (or are even WORSE at their jobs than their non-unionized counterparts), and they have simply organized themselves into this impenetrable bloc of power (with the support of liberal democrats who despise employers) and are now receiving “special” consideration-in the form of higher wages and better benefits-that they don’t deserve. The most crucial part of that entire storyline is that these union members don’t DESERVE higher wages-that they feel “entitled” to higher wages and the actual union structure (the legal entity some liberal created a long, long time ago) is a relic of the past that is now wreaking havoc on present employers who have to choose between bankruptcy (from threatended strikes) or meeting the unions’ ridiculous demands (which will also cause bankruptcy).
Now consider this: last night, we got to see firsthand that union refs are FAR better than non-union refs. We got to see over and over AND OVER again that the unsung heroes of the NFL are not the savvy and entreprenuerial business-owners, but the officiating crews. We got to see that the job they do is actually (surprise) difficult. And the resounding, deafening roar on twitter and facebook (from a predominantly non-liberal crowd of football enthusiasts) was “Why won’t Roger Goodell just pay the striking union refs what they’re worth?”. You see, no one believes for a second that the NFL is on the verge of bankruptcy. We know it’s a cash cow for the owners. And last night, it suddenly became clear that the choice is not between self-important union refs and cash-strapped NFL owners, but rather, between obviously well-trained and experienced NFL Officials and a commissioner who apparently cares more about profits (at the expense of these officials’ wages and benefits) than he does about the integrity of the game he’s supposed to be running. One comment I read put it this way (not sure if it was stolen. ha): “Goodell needs to pay those refs. It’s a million dollar problem in a Billion dollar industry.” In other words, the guys at the top have enough money already. Why won’t they just give these guys a raise? I commented at one point that last night’s game-ending disaster of a call (with two refs, side by side, making different signals and then finally deciding to go with the least reasonable one, and THEN forgetting to keep all the players on the field to finish the game) will probably end up on one of those HBO Sports documentaries as the pivotal moment in the NFL referee lockout. It truly was a potent event.
Interestingly enough, the team that got the short end of the stick last night was the Packers, who hail from Green Bay Wisconsin. I wonder how Scott Walker and Paul Ryan feel about that?
Paul Ryan's beloved Packers were robbed last night -- because the owners are putting the "moochers" in their place
If you want to know whom to blame for the surreal officiating fiasco that robbed Paul Ryan’s favorite football team of a win last night, the answer is Paul Ryan’s favorite political thinker. As improbable as it sounds, Ayn Rand’s lunatic brand of Marxism turned on its head is to a significant extent responsible for Lingerie Football League castoffs refereeing America’s most popular and profitable sport (with predictably catastrophic consequences).
To understand why, it’s first necessary to understand what sort of numbers we’re talking about here. NFL owners chose to lock out the sport’s referees because they’re trying to squeeze an extra $4,000 in revenues per game out of their cozy little $9 billion per year cartel arrangement. Now, to a normal human being $4,000 is real money, but NFL owners are not normal human beings.
They are people like William Clay Ford, who has made two masterful investments in his life, the second of which was to buy the Detroit Lions in 1963 for $4.5 million. The Lions - one of the NFL’s least valuable franchises - are estimated to be worth $855 million today. (Ford’s first key investment decision was to be born the grandson of Henry Ford.)
Ford is one of 18 billionaire NFL owners. It’s hard to grasp what that means, but put it this way: If a billionaire lost $4,000 in his couch cushions, it wouldn’t be worth it to him to dig around for the money. To a billionaire, $4,000 is, in economic terms, literally nothing. It’s a rounding error on the balance sheet of one of the many people he pays to keep track of such details. It adds no “marginal utility,” as economists say, to his already grotesque plentitude.
But $4,000 per game adds up, you say. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not. Wrong. To a billionaire, $62,000 per year (which is what Ford and his ilk stand to lose if they get no concessions at all from the employees they’re locking out) is again literally nothing. It’s like a quarter to an ordinary person. Would you stop to pick up a quarter lying on the sidewalk? Probably not if you were in a hurry. That’s how William Clay Ford feels about a $62,000 bill.
The thing is, this fight isn’t really about $62,000 per year. Lots of people are denouncing the owners for being “greedy,” but we football fans would be far better off if the owners’ current behavior were being motivated primarily by greed.
First of all, if this fight were actually about the money, it would have ended long ago. Continuing the lockout is sheer idiocy from a dollars-and-cents perspective, as the owners are doing serious damage to the quality of their immensely valuable investments because of a fight over what is, for them, not even pocket change.
Second, greed has limits. “Principle,” however, does not - which brings us back to the true villain of this debacle, crazy old Ayn Rand. The guiding principle of Rand’s thought has been summed up well by Jonathan Chait:
She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships - that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of “looters and moochers” stealing from society’s productive elements. In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite.
This, of course, is the wacky idea that has spread like an ideological infection through American political life, and that is embraced most fervently by the super-rich Lords of Capital who own baubles like NFL franchises and the contemporary Republican Party.
Ungrateful “moochers” like NFL referees - mere laborers who, unlike the captains of industry who deign to pay their wages, have failed to climb to the top of our ruthlessly meritocratic social pyramid - need to be shown their place. Although locking the refs out and replacing them with utterly incompetent substitutes is a nonsensical decision from an economic perspective, there’s a higher principle to be vindicated here, which is that the Heroic Businessman is responsible for everything good about America, and the lesser orders had better not forget it.
That, at the deepest ideological and psychological level, is why the NFL owners are insisting on doing their best to wreck the sport, in much the same way that their political lapdogs, like the Rand-worshiping Ryan, are dedicated to wrecking the nation.
Update: Speaking of wacky ideas and the politics of free association, Ryan tried this morning to connect the fact that union-busting owners are using scab labor with Obama’s policies: ”And you know what, it reminds me of President Obama and the economy,” [Ryan] contended. “If you can’t get it right, it is time to get out. I half think these refs work part-time for the Obama administration in the Budget Office. They see the national debt clock staring them in the face. They see a debt crisis, and they just ignore and pretend it didn’t even happen. They are trying to pick the winners and losers, and they don’t even do that very well.”
Blown call sparks NFL outcry
The football referee crisis may be the only time Americans side against management in a labor dispute
After three weeks of bumbling and griping, it looks like a disastrous game outcome, rather than a grievous personal injury, may force action in the NFL’s referee crisis.
Evidence that football causes brain damage is forcing the sport into something resembling an existential crisis. But as some observers wonder whether the NFL is morally defensible, the league has locked out the referees in a labor dispute, sidelining the people most responsible for the players’ safety on the field. Instead the first three weeks of the season have been overseen by a rag-tag bunch of borderline amateur officials who are satisfying nobody.
This has led to some comic moments. Mark Emmons of the San Jose Mercury News writes:
"Some replacements have embarrassed themselves even without a whistle. One was yanked hours before the New Orleans-Carolina game last week because his Facebook page revealed his unabashed Saints fandom. Philadelphia running back LeSean McCoy said another official told him he needed him to play well for his fantasy team."
Last night with the Seattle Seahawks losing by five to the Green Bay Packers, Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson threw a last minute bomb into the end zone. The New York Times described the action:
"Seahawks receiver Golden Tate used both hands to shove the Packers’ Sam Shields out of the way - clearly a penalty, but it was not called. The Packers’ M.D. Jennings grabbed the ball and came down with it, and Tate wrapped his arms around Jennings and the ball and tried to take it away from him. One official signaled a score, and the other an interception. The replay upheld the touchdown, with the head official Wayne Elliott later telling reporters: “The ruling on the final play was a simultaneous catch. Reviewed by replay. Play stands. [A catch by] both players goes to the offense.”"
Touchdown, the Seahawks win. The overwhelming verdict, however, has been that the Packers’ Jennings intercepted the ball in the end zone. The Los Angeles Times reaction captures the general outrage:
"It’s finally happened. After three weeks of forgetting the rules, losing track of the ball, and haphazardly administering this country’s national pastime as if they were salesmen on vacation from Foot Locker, the replacement officials have finally done serious, irrevocable damage. The arrogant NFL’s middle-school and small-college substitutes for the locked-out regular officials have finally, actually, literally made one wrong call that decided the outcome of a game."
It was one of the worst calls in the history of the league, yet it might turn out to be one of the best calls if humiliated Commissioner Roger Goodell was listening to the message it sent.
Even viewers who know nothing about footballl can appreciate that the two refs on the scene are in perfect disagreement. It’s even clearer in the instant replay
A Big Deal Off The Field?
TPM Reader CM thinks we’re missing the significance of what happened last night on the gridiron …
I’m a huge fan of TPM (sort of religious about reading pretty much every article you publish), but this morning, I’m a little surprised you guys are not reporting on what is, in my opinion, a HUGE story: the Seattle/Green Bay Monday Night Football game. Normally, I would understand why something like this would not make the cut on a political news site, but if you caught the game and were around on facebook or twitter afterwards, you might have seen the significant public response over the officiating-and how all of that response is tied directly to the public perception of the fight over union rights and wages.
The prevailing conservative storyline has always been that union members are no better than non-union members (or are even WORSE at their jobs than their non-unionized counterparts), and they have simply organized themselves into this impenetrable bloc of power (with the support of liberal democrats who despise employers) and are now receiving “special” consideration-in the form of higher wages and better benefits-that they don’t deserve. The most crucial part of that entire storyline is that these union members don’t DESERVE higher wages-that they feel “entitled” to higher wages and the actual union structure (the legal entity some liberal created a long, long time ago) is a relic of the past that is now wreaking havoc on present employers who have to choose between bankruptcy (from threatended strikes) or meeting the unions’ ridiculous demands (which will also cause bankruptcy).
Now consider this: last night, we got to see firsthand that union refs are FAR better than non-union refs. We got to see over and over AND OVER again that the unsung heroes of the NFL are not the savvy and entreprenuerial business-owners, but the officiating crews. We got to see that the job they do is actually (surprise) difficult. And the resounding, deafening roar on twitter and facebook (from a predominantly non-liberal crowd of football enthusiasts) was “Why won’t Roger Goodell just pay the striking union refs what they’re worth?”. You see, no one believes for a second that the NFL is on the verge of bankruptcy. We know it’s a cash cow for the owners. And last night, it suddenly became clear that the choice is not between self-important union refs and cash-strapped NFL owners, but rather, between obviously well-trained and experienced NFL Officials and a commissioner who apparently cares more about profits (at the expense of these officials’ wages and benefits) than he does about the integrity of the game he’s supposed to be running. One comment I read put it this way (not sure if it was stolen. ha): “Goodell needs to pay those refs. It’s a million dollar problem in a Billion dollar industry.” In other words, the guys at the top have enough money already. Why won’t they just give these guys a raise? I commented at one point that last night’s game-ending disaster of a call (with two refs, side by side, making different signals and then finally deciding to go with the least reasonable one, and THEN forgetting to keep all the players on the field to finish the game) will probably end up on one of those HBO Sports documentaries as the pivotal moment in the NFL referee lockout. It truly was a potent event.
Interestingly enough, the team that got the short end of the stick last night was the Packers, who hail from Green Bay Wisconsin. I wonder how Scott Walker and Paul Ryan feel about that?