As we await Sunday’s Super Bowl, we should be grateful America’s
football does not follow its politics. Comparing their prevailing
trends clearly explains their standing in the public’s opinion. It
also explains why they are producing such different results.
The dichotomy could not be greater between America’s favorite
sporting event, the Super Bowl, and its politics’ growing
prevalence, class warfare. We find the celebration of excellence
juxtaposed to the politics of envy.
If professional football has “one-percenters,” the Super Bowl is
where they live. Where is Occupy Wall Street? Where is the outrage?
If our national politics were foisted onto our national obsession,
these teams, which so disproportionately benefitted from the
current system, would be forced to give back a large share of their
“excessive” wins to the Commissioner — and feel guilty about it in
the process.
The very existence of a gap between teams — those making and
those missing the playoffs — would be cause for concern. The
question would certainly arise whether this gap was growing. Teams
coming up short in the regular season would have their envy stoked
by accusations that Super Bowl teams had benefitted unfairly from a
rigged system.
Would not such actions promote “fairness”? Why should a handful
of playoff teams be further rewarded because they won a
disproportionate share of games? Why would redistributing some of
those wins to other teams not be a good idea? Would it not be
better if all the teams were 8-8 and everyone made the
playoffs?
Taking off our national political hat and putting on our
national football helmet, such sentiments seem absurd. They
fundamentally violate the essence of football. The very reason we
watch is to see a system in which teams are striving to be the
best, not entitled to be mediocre.
But there is a bigger and far more important reason why applying
politics’ growing trend to our football would be misguided: It
would be bad for football itself. Teams having wins stripped away
would stop striving, since they were going to be taken from them.
Teams having wins given to them would do likewise, since they would
get wins anyway. Quickly, football itself would
deteriorate.
Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek made the same points over 50
years ago in The Constitution of Liberty. Writing about
nations and the premise of wealth redistribution between them, he
observed: “But most of the gains of the few do, in the course of
time, become available to the rest. If we abandoned progress, we
should also have to abandon all those social improvements that we
now hope for… We have only to remember that to prevent progress at
the top would soon prevent it all the way down, in order to see
that this result is really the last thing we want.”
Hayek’s point: We all benefit from the excelling of a few.
Counterintuitive as this might seem, and as contrary as its
short-term effects may initially appear, its long-term outcome
leads to more rapid economic growth through the creation and
dissemination of products we would not otherwise have.
While this may not appear so clearly in our economics — and our
growing political trend certainly aims to obscure it — its truth is
quickly evident when applied back to football. Football would
deteriorate if the politics of envy were applied to it. Fans of all
those non-Super Bowl teams, even non-football fans, tune in to this
game. A majority wish their teams were in it — and hope they will
be next year — but they still want to see the best this year. They
benefit from it.
And football itself does as well. It has advanced on the
innovations of the excellent. Dynasties have benefitted for a
while, but before long their innovations are commonplace throughout
the league. As a result, the entire game and all its fans have
benefitted. There is a reason why the tactics of 40, or even 10,
years ago no longer prevail in today’s NFL. Nothing prevents teams
using them now… except their desire to win.
When we compare our football to our politics, we see the two
dominated by different goals: seeking to promote opportunity,
versus seeking to dictate outcomes. The NFL does many things to
promote equal opportunities for its teams — most notably having
teams with the worst records having the first chance to pick the
best players.
However, there is a big difference between seeking to promote
opportunity, as football does, and seeking to dictate outcomes, as
our politics increasingly seeks to do. And there is an economic
danger in the latter, just as Hayek stated.
Instead of a Super Bowl economy, we have an also-ran one. It
smacks of being an end-of-season game between two losing teams.
There is a reason such games are not showcased on a special Sunday.
Just like the enormous audience tuning into Sunday’s Super Bowl, we
all want to participate in a winning economy.
It can be easy to overlook the obvious, especially when there
are those telling us to do just that. So sometimes we need to look
from a different angle to see it, especially when it offers us
unfiltered facts we intuitively know.
Photo: UPI
