Based Libertarian Baseball vs. Fake Neoliberal Football

The difference between Major League Baseball and the National Football League are emblematic of the differences between what the United States of America were founded as and what the United States is today (change from plural to singular tense deliberate). MLB Baseball is old America, based on libertarian free market capitalism, while NFL Football is new America, based on neoliberal progressive democratic socialism. Baseball is based; football is fake.

NFL football has the facade of being a macho American capitalist sport, but the rules are watered down to protect players, and the salary cap and revenue sharing are pure socialist. America today presents the facade of being a free country with a capitalist system, but the crony corporations are making all the money, receiving corporate welfare, and the Federal Reserve is destroying the lower and middle classes with its monetary policy. The US hasn't had a free market since 1913 when the Fed was invented, and the American government/economy has become incrementally more socialized since. Likewise the NFL owners are making all the money (along with a few star players), but the lower-class players struggle to get by with non-guaranteed contracts. Suffer a career-ending injury early on (like Damar Hamlin) and you’re screwed. Plus the franchise tag prevents star players from maximizing their full earning potential as a free agent, even within the confines of the salary cap system.

Despite this, NFL football is the most popular sport in America, supported by many of the same red-blooded Americans who proudly salute the flag and supposedly hate socialism. Boomer-cons abhore socialism, but don't you dare touch their medicare and social security. They vote for Republican hacks who continually screw them over, just like the NFL owners take advantage of their players, without whom they’d be nothing.

Baseball was traditionally America’s pastime, but it has been dwindling in popularity over the past couple decades, especially compared to the NFL. Yet the MLB is a truer reflection of what America was founded on: liberty, entrepreneurship, and free market capitalism. Baseball is the one major American sport with no salary cap and all contracts are fully guaranteed. Aside for some restrictions on the contracts of young minor league prospects (which should be abolished), the MLB has a true free market where players can make as much money as they deserve.

NFL fans will say a salary cap is needed to maintain parity, or else the rich big-market teams would win every year. Such people sound exactly like Karl Marx who uses the same arguments for the necessity of economic redistribution or else the same rich capitalists would continue getting richer while the poor stays poor. But communism is not true in the world economy or the sports economy.

In free market capitalism poor people continually become rich by working their way up a company or being entrepreneurs and inventing new products and services. In the sports world, money cannot buy championships. The New York Yankees often have the highest payroll in baseball and they are usually good, but they do not always win the World Series. Meanwhile, one of the smallest market teams, the Kansas City Royals, won it all in 2015. Money can perhaps buy you a ticket to the playoffs, but it never guarantees a World Series.

The absence of a salary cap in the MLB forces small-market teams to be smarter and more innovative. There would not have been the “Moneyball” revolution if there was a salary cap in baseball and Billy Beane was guaranteed, through socialist league policy, to get his “fair share” of good players redistributed to him. It is the same reason the communist Soviet Union failed to have as many innovative technologies and successful companies as capitalist America. Monopolies are not a result of free market capitalism, but from government interference with the free market. It is the monopolies themselves who write their own regulation (designed to raise the barrier of entry for potential competition). Without such government interference, mammoth companies like Microsoft get bogged down by bureaucracy and disrupted by innovative startups like Google, who become mammoth companies that get disrupted by innovations like crypto. Regulation stifles innovation. In baseball, big-spending teams like the Yankees and Angels get bogged down by bloated salaries for superstars past their prime and get beaten by small-market teams with young underpaid budding superstars before they get their big paycheck. You cannot cheat the free market and win—but you can cheat a highly regulated system of coercive redistribution and win.

Baseball is a wholly American sport, invented in America, and it is older and more traditional than football, which shares a name with the globalist sport, soccer. Red-blooded American football fans dismiss European soccer as a “gay socialist sport” compared to American football, which is for “real men.” Yet which sport’s players wear full-body pads to protect themselves? Not to mention all the recent rules in the NFL to prevent hard hits and concussions. Quarterbacks in today’s NFL receive less physical contact than some Champions League soccer players. You try receiving repeated headers and metal spikes to the back of your calf. Plus European soccer, like Major League Baseball, is more capitalist in its economics—there is no salary cap and even less restrictions for young prospects than the MLB.

Football in its purest form, without helmets and pads, and without the centralized owners and their rules, salary caps and revenue-sharing, is a great sport. Just as America in its purest form, without the taxes and social programs, and without the centralized Federal government, their regulations and the Federal Reserve, is a great country. Many American conservatives are beginning to finally wake up to see that present-day America is not the beacon of liberty it once was (and hasn't been for quite some time). Perhaps by demanding our sports be more free-market oriented, our country might follow. Stop voting for Republican hacks who pretend to be conservative, and stop supporting corporations that pretend to be capitalist. The sports themselves might not be free markets, but your choice to watch and support them is. Watching the NFL is a vote for socialism. Americans need to send a message to the NFL by taking themselves out to “the old ball game.”