Austerity

Apparently there's a rumor that a lot of Major League Baseball executives feel that the best chance the Wilpon family would have of retaining control of the Mets, given their financial difficulties, would be to conduct a fire sale. Get rid of Reyes, Beltran, K-Rod, Bay, even maybe David Wright, and gut the payroll down to $70 million, about half what it is currently. That way the team would be raking in net money, and they might inspire the confidence of banks that are currently uninterested in loaning the team any more money.

Reading this logic, there's only one word running through my head: austerity. That train of thought is identical to the agenda being pushed by right-wing parties in just about every industrialized nation right now. We're in financial trouble, so we must cut spending dramatically. There are, of course, two problems with the logic of austerity, however. The first is that pursuing austerity means you end up doing a really sucky job of the thing you're supposed to be doing; in the case of a baseball team that means winning baseball games, and in the case of a government it means all that stuff about providing for the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. The second is that it's counterproductive. If you cut government spending and balance the budget during the recovery from a recession, you just might end up choking that recovery and losing lots of tax dollars, canceling out the original austerity. If you cut payroll from your big-market baseball team, hoping to pocket the resulting surplus, you are likely instead to find that nobody shows up to watch your baseball games. I'm about as die-hard a Mets fan as there is, but if the Wilpons get rid of everyone who's on the team right now it would distinctly lower my interest in going to games, or in watching games. A large part of the reason I watch Mets games right now is Jose Reyes. I will watch fewer Mets games if he's not in them. I would probably go to fewer Mets games if Reyes isn't on the team. And fewer fans in the stadium means, well, less money. So, good-bye surplus. And you just cost yourself a whole bunch of All-Star caliber players, for nothing.

Don't'cha just love conservative thinking?