THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

A (laxly regulated) free market worked so well in the United States that I, and other taxpayers, are footing a trillion dollar bill to keep financial, auto, and other institutions alive.

That analysis uses entirely generic arguments, in fact the graphs are just hotlinked from wikipedia.

I have to guess that the supply of hockey...seats? is relatively inelastic (in that you can’t easily just jam more seats into an arena), which would significantly reduce the deadweight loss from a price ceiling.

Excess demand.

A box seat in Yankee Stadium costs $75 because there are many more people willing to pay that price than there are seats at that price. The same seat is $25 in Pittsburgh, and even at that price they can’t fill them.

Andy, the Community Reivestment Act, in an effort to get more people owning their own homes, and to stop “redlining” in urban areas, and as enforced in the 1990’s under Clinton, forced banks to write risky loans. Groups such as ACORN brokered and approved loans, and received commissions. They had no vested interest in whether the people could repay. Freddie and Fannie spread the toxic loans around, thinking that if it was spread thin enough, it wasn’t a risk to anyone. When prices fell, putting many loans “underwater” so that people couldn’t refinance or sell to get out of a costly mortgage, they defaulted, and everything came crashing down.

Bush tried to take the government’s foot off the gas pedal by not enforcing the CRA as viforously. When everythign fell aprt, however, it was Bush’s Treasury who forced all banka, even healthy ones, to take bailouts, because if ownly the bad banks took bailouts, everyone would know who the bad banks were. But once they took the federal bailout, the government came into tell them how to run their business.

So where does “laxly regulated” fall into this? Congress and the Clinton admin got us into it, and now Congress and the Bush admin want us to believe that they can fix it.

If someone runs his business into the ground, it ought to fail. Someone else will take it’s place.

Even in perfect inelasticity there is still some deadweight loss.

"Andy, the Community Reivestment Act, in an effort to get more people owning their own homes, and to stop “redlining” in urban areas, and as enforced in the 1990’s under Clinton, forced banks to write risky loans. “

Brian, that’s a serious charge that goes against the prevailing wisdom. Extraordinary claim require evidence… what’s the evidence that banks were forced? It seems counter-intuitive - it was there money (although it wasn’t, it was the money of those who bought commercial paper with inflating credit ratings)… how could banks be “forced” by Clinton to make bad loans?

This smells of propaganda… I invite you to provide evidence, but I’m (understandably?) skeptical.

Guys,

From time-to-time, we have non-sports threads, and those are clearly marked. 

Feel free to make these politically-inclined posts in those threads. If you want to continue this discussion, do so there, and I’ll then retroactively move posts 3 and 5 there.

Even if Andy’s formulation for the cause of the current financial crisis was accurate, I don’t see how it is the least bit relevant to the topic at hand. The piece that Tango cites makes a very simple argument: the price of hockey tickets is directly linked to what people are willing to pay and is therefor perfectly fair. Does Andy doubt this? Does he think that people are being forced to pay those prices against their will? Does he really believe that government regulation is necessary? Most likely not, he just couldn’t help injecting politics into things. That’s a shame because all that does pollute an otherwise enjoyable discussion.

Getting back on track, it is clear to me that this is exactly right. Going to a ballgame is 100% voluntary, thus whatever price the vendor chooses to charge is completely fair. Not only is attending a professional sporting event a luxury rather than a necessity, but there are tons and tons of other entertainment options available in a big city at all price ranges. If you don’t think the cost of tickets is worth the enjoyment you would get out of them, you don’t have to pay up and you can do something else with your money. That’s your choice.

Besides, lots of people don’t even have the opportunity to go to major sporting events regularly. I live hundreds of miles away from the nearest professional team and have only been to a major league ballpark on two occasions in my life. It costs me far more money to see a game than it does the typical person who complains about the price of tickets. Not surprisingly, I’m not very sympathetic to those people who can go just about anytime they want. If all it cost me was 25 bucks to see a Mariners game, I’d be thrilled.

Yankee fans pay so much for tickets, in part, because the team can exercise the federally sanctioned monopoly power granted to MLB to prevent more teams from moving in.  In a true free market, there would be four or five baseball teams in New York, and prices would be more in line with the rest of the country.  Until that happens, complaints about the evils of communistic price freezing strike me as pretty lame.