I am reminded of that piece Bill Maher did a few years ago about how the NFL works because of Marxism (revenue sharing.)

While I deeply sympathize with the regular refs, who are only striking to preserve defined benefit pensions to which the NFL long ago agreed, I think it would be perversely ironic if those pensions survived only because this call (which the regular refs would almost certainly have made, too) convinced the NFL to deal.

The author of Salons piece DOES have a valid (if somewhat irrelevant) point though: In the Ayn Rand Football League, the Green Bay Packers would have gone the way of the Canton Bulldogs and Massillon Tigers. Without the draft, small-market teams like Green Bay (VERY small-market in the '30s and '40s) could never compete with Chicago, New York of Philly for star players. If you had a CHOICE between playing in a "city" where you had to walk five miles to get a newspaper with coverage of your performance, or a media Mecca that broadcast your prowess to the nation and offered all the luxuries to which you felt entitled, which would you pick?

What if your choice were dictated solely by salary, and the Bears, Giants and Eagles had ticket sales from the countrys three largest cities? In 1940 Green Bay could not have filled venues like the Rose Bowl if the whole town of 102,000 came. Thanks to revenue sharing, however, GB has as much with which to pay players as every other team does. Since the salary cap (which Rand would also have loathed,) owners cannot even supplement that with their own wealth: Each team has $x (currently ~$120 million) to split among 48 players (plus 5 practice squad players.) Anyone who cannot be paid must be released to the highest bidder (if any,) and even if no one takes them they STILL cannot return to the old team unless it can pay them NFL minimum wage (which increases with experience) without exceeding the cap.

It goes without saying how Rand would feel about Green Bays status as the only publicly owned NFL team. It ensures the Packers fans will never know the agony Oilers fans like me (or Colts fans, Rams fans (twice,) Cardinals fans, Browns fans and Raiders fans) felt when our teams owner followed through on threats to leave town unless the city met their demands (usually for new stadiums.) Cleveland residents and Rams fans (which were at one point synonymous) have been especially victimized; the Rams moved to L.A. in the '40s, then St. Louis in the '90s (after the Cardinals moved from there to Arizona, having previously moved TO there from Chicago.) They also saw coach Paul Brown, who led the team from its founding to 7 championships, begin the rival Cincinnati Bengals after owner Art Modell fired him, then a generation later saw Modell move the whole team to Baltimore (who had lost the Colts to Indianapolis in the '80s.) The Rams final move gave all NFL owners lasting leverage in negotiations with host cities, because L.A. has been without a team ever since, and threats to move teams to the nations second largest city are a powerful motivator for current host cities.

Green Bay, of course, need never worry about any of that, because the host city IS the owner, and since getting season tickets requires putting ones name on a list and waiting for hundreds of people to DIE they are assured a large homefield crowd. It is still rank socialism by any measure.

The Green Bay Packers are anathema to everything Ayn Rand believed, but then, so is Thomas Aquinas. Paul Ryan is an... odd fellow....