Cybrpnk's Rantings

Well, it's been a while. The trip to Japan was amazing. An incredible, and incredibly odd, country. A stunning mix of old and new. The trip was followed by the near-obligatory crash and low-grade cold that so often accompanies large changes in time zones and long flights. Now, back to some ranting.

I've been thinking lately about fairness, and about how little our society seems to value it. Most things seem to be set up to favor those who behave badly. Given the prevalent attitude in most professional sports these days, rules seem to be an inconvenience to be circumvented when they are in one's way, and invoked when the other side seems to be benifiting from ignoring them. Oddly, this seems to be pretty much what happens with corporations as well. Big corporations spend massive amounts of money paying lawyers to find loopholes in laws, lobbyists to change inconvenient laws, and PR flacks to whine about how government is intruding on their rights. I hope some day this country will wake up and decide that the rights of people should carry a lot more weight in law and government than the so-called rights of corporations.

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Here are some proposals for addressing this lack of respect for the law in both arenas. Let's start with sport. Somehow we have gotten into our societal consciousness the bizarre concept that people exhibiting great proficiency at certain freakish physical acts (such as hitting a curveball or stopping a hockey puck) should not only be paid enormously well, but should be looked up to as role models. This might not be so egregious, if we didn't also get so twisted up in our drive to win that we've decided that these athletes should be held to a lower standard when it comes to enforcing the rules. It starts with lowered academic standards, but goes all the way to standing by a player convicted for drunk driving based on the compelling moral case that it isn't so easy to find defensive linemen who can really put pressure on an NFL quarterback. Shockingly the executives at the companies that own a lot of these sports team ended up believing that their unique talents should be equally rewarded both financially, and with exemption from the rules most people have to live with.

So how can we fix sport? Here's a simple proposal: after each game a group of officials reviews all available tape of the game. Any deliberate infraction that is discovered on tape, but missed during the game, is punished with substantial fines. Any player who is fined more than a certain number of times in a season is suspended. Maybe knowing that someone is looking over their shoulder would lead to less cheating.

I have a couple of other little proposals for fixing sport. First is to change the tax code so that no money spent by businesses on attendance at sporting events is tax deductible. How galling is it that there are all of these teams playing in arenas that are partially or completely paid for by the taxpayers, but the average taxpayer can't afford to go to games because ticket prices have been driven up by the willingness of corporations to pay really high prices which they are offsetting by writing it off of their taxes, thus passing the cost on the the very people they are shutting out of the games.

One other tax change related to sport: anyone who makes their money in sports or other entertainment (movies, TV, etc.) falls under a special tax rule. Any income (in any form, not just money) that exceeds, say, $1,000,000 a year, is taxed at 90%. That includes endorsements. I don't begrudge these people being able to live in comfort for the rest of their lives, but I question the harm to society done by the massive amount of money that flows through entertainment.

Final change to clean up sport? Some full disclosure in pricing of products. Any product that is advertised using celebrity endorsement should include on its packaging a statement as to how much of the purchase price is going directly to rich celebrities. I'd just love to see how that changes product marketing.

As to those executives? And remember this isn't everyone in an executive suite, it's a subset. All of those people who justify actions which are clearly wrong on the basis that they are legal, that's who I'm talking about. Here's a test for them. Let's put them in front of a panel of kids, say 8-10 year olds, and have them explain exactly what they did. No discussion of what the law says, no rationales, just the facts. If the kids think that what they did sounds wrong, they go to jail. What sort of revolution in business ethics (all too often an oxymoron in today's world) would that bring about?