Today in 1956, Nat King Cole became the first black man to host a TV show, on NBC:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Elvis Presley performed at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. To get the fans to leave after repeated encore requests, announcer Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building.”
My favorite criminals are those known in the literature — or at least in the movies — as “standovers,” criminals who specialize in victimizing other criminals. Examples of the type are Omar Little in The Wire, whose occupation is robbing Baltimore drug dealers, and the Joker in The Dark Knight, who loots and extorts Gotham’s mob bosses. The really bold ones who show up at large drug deals and rob both sides.
The problem with the standover business model, obviously, is the same as the problem of scorched-earth banditry: It drives away exactly the sort of activity that the criminal needs to make his own living — it’s a crime on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. For this reason, banditry frequently degenerates into a protection racket, a relatively modest tax on criminal enterprises and non-criminal enterprises alike. Protection rackets have their own challenges: For one thing, you actually do have to provide some protection, mainly from other predators like you. Over the years, economic success and administrative demands eventually transform bands of roving bandits into bands of stationary bandits. One popular theory of the state — one that is pretty well-supported by the historical evidence in the European context — is that this is where governments come from: protection rackets that survive for a long enough period of time that they take on a patina of legitimacy. At some point, Romulus-and-Remus stories are invented to explain that the local Mafiosi have not only historical roots but divine sanction.
The fundamental problem — the provision of services — never really goes away. It is even today a critical issue in places that are (or recently have been) ruled by crime syndicates such as the Taliban and Fatah. Hamas, especially, is known to put some real effort into the social-services front. There are some services that markets historically have not done a very good job of providing — these are called “public goods,” which is a specific term from political economy and not a synonym for “stuff the public thinks is desirable” — and their provision is the only real reason we have governments. Or, more precisely: Providing public goods is the only legitimate reason we have governments.
In reality, we have governments for lots of reasons, most of them illegitimate: That ancient instinct toward banditry is powerful, and the desire to make a living by simply commanding economic resources rather than earning them through trade or labor seems to be a fixed feature of a certain subset of human beings. Patronage and clientelism are very strong forces, too, and government can be used to create public-sector salaries or welfare benefits that are well in excess of the wages that political clients could expect to earn in honest work. In the United States, our swollen public-sector payrolls, particularly at the state and local level, are little more than a supplementary welfare state, providing a more dignified form of public dependency for relatively low-skilled and mainly unenterprising people.
Lately, our Democrat friends have taken to pointing out that things are done rather differently in places such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where taxes are very high and where — our progressive friends generally leave this bit out — people get a lot more for what they pay in taxes. Once you figure in federal, state, and local spending, U.S. public-sector spending isn’t much different from Canada’s or much of Europe’s or the OECD’s — but what do we get for it?
Been to the DMV lately? …
If you ever have started a business, you are more than a little familiar with the armed-middleman business model, with 70 or 80 percent of your compliance challenges being composed of things that you have to comply with for the sake of complying with them. I always enjoyed putting up those OSHA posters featuring men in hardhats and shovels in my newspaper offices, where the most likely injury was carpel-tunnel injury or possible hearing damage when I started yelling at you around deadline time. I once put the question to a young, idealistic liberal Democratic budget guy in the employ of the city of Philadelphia: “What share of city workers actually does something useful?” His estimate was about 1 in 10, excluding police, firemen, and teachers — but, considering the number of police officers whose full-time job is administrative work at the Police Athletic League, you might want to qualify that further still.
When it comes to government, if you aren’t involved in the provision of actual public goods, you are involved in extortion. It may be legal. It may have the blessing of the mayor, the city council, and your union representative, but it’s still extortion. And you should be ashamed of yourself. If your only purpose is getting in the way until somebody hands you money, then you are part of a protection racket. And you might want to think about going into a more honorable line of work.
Thanks to a tip from a sharp-eyed Power Line reader, I went back to a New York Times story about a recent Senate hearing on Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that Puerto Rico is bidding to be the Greece of the western hemisphere, but since it is a U.S. territory it is Washington rather than the E.U. that is being looked to for a bailout. Naturally the Obama administration is working on a bailout plan.
Toward the end of the Times story, the fun really gets rolling:
Democratic senators at the hearing made it clear that they were deeply concerned about some hedge funds betting on Puerto Rico’s crisis and the possibility that they were seeking to influence the rescue plan in order to maximize profits.
Imagine that! Creditors wanting to have some say in restructuring a debt burden! It’s like this has never happened before or something. Dogs and cats, living together! Real “end of days” stuff.
And sure enough, Bernie is leading the hit parade.
Mr. Sanders said that what he termed “vulture funds” had been buying up Puerto Rico’s debt for as little as 30 cents on the dollar.
“Why should they get 100 percent of their investment when they are paying 30 to 70 percent for their bonds?” he said.
Mr. Weiss said that some debt securities were yielding 11 percent.
“Whoa!” Mr. Sanders exclaimed. “They are receiving 11 percent and children in Puerto Rico are going hungry. That, for me, is not an equation that works.”
Where to begin? “Why should they get 100 percent of their investment when they are paying 30 to 70 percent on their bonds?” Well, a fellow named Alexander Hamilton explained that once, after “speculators” had bought up much of the debt issued by the Continental Congress and U.S. government under the Articles of Confederation, often for pennies on the dollar. Hamilton pointed out that if the U.S. didn’t honor the debt, no one would ever lend money to the U.S. again. “Full faith and credit” isn’t worth much if lenders think you won’t honor your debts.
Sanders objects that some investors are “receiving 11 percent” while children are going hungry. Actually investors won’t receive anything if Puerto Rico defaults. More likely they’ll receive market rates of return if the debt is restructured, which makes Puerto Rico bonds a normal investment. But what about the widows and orphans and union pension funds that bought Puerto Rico bonds at full face value (and a lower coupon rate)? Does Mr. Sanders care about them? Or should they be screwed just to satisfy Bernie Sanders’s lust to punish Wall Street?
This subject might make for a series of good questions for Sanders at the next Democratic debate. Should President George Washington have defaulted on the U.S. debt in the 1790s? What about 1981, when U.S. long-term bonds had a coupon rate of 13 percent, while they were hungry children (some of them in Vermont)? Better still, if the U.S. hits a debt crisis some time in the near future, would President Sanders recommend defaulting on U.S. sovereign debt because some banks have taken the risk to buy our debt at a discount? Just how would he distinguish “vultures” from other debt investors? (Actually, I know the answer to this last question: the same way the Obama administration distinguished between GM bondholders and union claimants in the auto industry bailout. Socialism always ends in gangster government.)
Today in 1963, John Lennon showed his ability to generate publicity at the Beatles’ performance at the Royal Variety Show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were in attendance, so perhaps they were the target of Lennon’s comment, “In the cheaper seats you clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewelry.”
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1972:
Today in 1990, Melissa Ethridge and her “life partner” Julie Cypher appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine for its cover story on gay parenting.
I bring this up only to point out that Etheridge and Cypher no longer are life partners, Cypher (the ex-wife of actor Lou Diamond Phillips) is now married to another man, and Etheridge became engaged to another woman, but they split before their planned California wedding. And, by the way, Cypher had two children from the “contribution” of David Crosby, and Etheridge’s second woman had children from another man. Draw your own conclusions.
Reason fires a brushback pitch, so to speak, at former Major League Baseball commissioner and Brewers owner Bud Selig in a book review:
If not for Bud Selig, erstwhile owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and his single-minded determination to control Major League Baseball’s costs by imposing a salary cap on players, George W. Bush probably would have never run for governor of Texas, much less president of the United States.
That is just one long-rumored story confirmed in Jon Pessah’s The Game, a sweeping and comprehensive investigation of the business of baseball over the past three decades. Selig, along with former Players Association chief Donald Fehr and the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, is both credited and blamed for just about everything that has brought America’s pastime into the modern era.
Once struggling to survive, Major League Baseball (MLB) now enjoys massive revenues, billion-dollar local TV contracts, and per-game attendance levels that are up by more than 5,300 over 1995, even after a recent slight decline. But the game also suffers from a confused legacy, with its record books (fetishized by its fans like no other sport’s) tainted in the minds of many by the influence of rampant performance-enhancing drug use.
It is Selig whose legacy is most scrutinized. For all his successes, the second-generation used car mogul from Milwaukee comes across as a panicky, short-sighted crony capitalist who fleeced the taxpayers and fans of his home city and actively enabled other owners to do the same.
To tell the ultimate inside-baseball story, Pessah, a founding editor at ESPN: The Magazine, interviewed more than 150 people, including players, coaches, senior front office staffers, and three MLB commissioners—Selig, Fay Vincent, and the new guy, Rob Manfred.
The story begins in the early 1990s, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush—the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner—to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.
Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of “no confidence” in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig “would support his dream to become baseball’s next Commissioner.” It didn’t work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush’s dream job. He would preside over a players’ strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history—something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn’t accomplish—but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly ’60s and ’70s mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Selig was the proud steward of baseball’s rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.
The commissioner’s old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.
Soon after Selig took the job, he was summoned before Congress for one of many hearings in which a committee of mad-as-hell senators threatened to revoke baseball’s antitrust exemption if the sport failed to appoint an “independent commissioner” soon.
Congress’ leverage over MLB lies in that exemption. Baseball is the only professional sports league to enjoy the privilege of a legalized monopoly, thanks to a 1922 Supreme Court decision declaring that baseball is “not interstate commerce.” Pessah correctly calls this a “mistake” but is certain Congress will never reverse it—because then “what excuse would lawmakers have to hold hearings that give them invaluable face time on ESPN and headlines in the New York Times?”
As owner of one of the most moribund franchises in all of sports, residing in the league’s smallest media market, Selig’s modus operandi for nearly all of his tenure was to stress the dire financial state of baseball and the majority of its teams. He was particularly offended by owners, such as Steinbrenner, who unapologetically reinvested their profits into the product on the field, agreeing with other owners’ characterization of the Yankee boss as an “economic bully” who was “bad for the game.” When confronted with the evidence of a number of well-run and innovative small-market teams consistently finding ways to compete—the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays, for example—Selig brushed them off as short-term “aberrations.” Pessah notes that Selig would never “consider that maybe he might not be very good at building a baseball team.” He always insisted that the solution to fix the “broken” system was “taking more of Steinbrenner’s money.”
The commissioner would never deviate from this philosophy, despite the fact that MLB enjoys greater parity in the number of teams making it to the postseason than any of the other three major professional American sports leagues (all of which, it should be noted, have salary caps).
In the run-up to the disastrous 1994 players’ strike, Selig pushed the mantra that fans of small-market teams need to have “hope and faith” that their teams would have a reasonable chance of competing for a championship. In Selig’s worldview, billionaires should not and could not be expected to invest in their vanity projects or responsibly manage their finances. Instead, less successful franchises should be subsidized by the more successful teams, and the players’ “out of control” salaries must be capped if the league were to survive.
The Selig-led cadre of owners, many of whom were found to have illegally colluded during the 1987 offseason to not sign each other’s free agents, demanded both a salary cap and revenue sharing, which Selig called “inextricably linked.” To which Fehr, the players union leader, retorted, “The real linkage is the big market owners won’t share with small market owners unless the players give them back the money.”
A talented politician, Selig was able to unite all the owners, including the large-market Steinbrenner, into pushing his agenda. Though the 1994 strike would lead to a cancelled World Series and apocalyptic public relations while yielding no salary cap, the amenability of large-market teams to consider revenue sharing was established.
Revenue sharing would indeed help teams like the Oakland Athletics, whose General Manager Billy Beane revolutionized the game using advanced analytics to determine players’ true value. The A’s regularly reached the postseason despite playing in a universally loathed stadium ill-suited for baseball, housed in an economically depressed city, with one of the lowest payrolls in the league.
But too many other teams would simply pocket their revenue sharing funds, including the Florida Marlins, who Deadspinreported were turning a league-leading $50 million in profits over two years when their payroll was at or near the bottom of the league. Another team taking in more revenue than it invested on payroll was Selig’s own Brewers. (After six years as acting commissioner, Selig transferred ownership of the team to his daughter Wendy so he could maintain the pretense that he was an “independent commissioner.”)
Though critical of a great many aspects of Selig’s management, Pessah gives credit where it is due. Not too long after the players got back on the field in 1995, baseball’s popularity boomed. As an owner, Selig’s management was pathetic. As commissioner, he saw the game enjoy a renaissance, though it would come with a cost.
That same year, former Sen. Mitchell, a longtime Selig ally (and Boston Red Sox executive), released his eponymous report, billed as the comprehensive history of the steroid era. It delivered on its promise to name names. But despite the millions Mitchell personally made on the report (paid for by MLB) and the two years it took to create, the document was mostly a retread of information already gleaned in the BALCO investigation.
The only significant scoops came from two snitching drug dealers who were able to cut deals to avoid prison by cooperating with Mitchell: New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski and former New York Yankees/Toronto Blue Jays trainer Brian McNamee, both of whom implicated dozens of players, including arguably the best pitcher of his generation, Roger Clemens.
For all its hype, the Mitchell Report would not be the last word on the Steroid Era. In 2013, the South Florida–based “anti-aging clinic” Biogenesis was revealed to have been peddling performance enhancing drugs to numerous players, including such stars as Ryan Braun, Bartolo Colon, and Nelson Cruz—but none so drew Selig’s ire as much as Alex Rodriguez.
Unlike the three aforementioned players, Rodriguez had not failed a drug test, but the overwhelming evidence that he bought drugs from Biogenesis for years, plus his determination to obfuscate MLB’s investigation, led to open warfare between the commissioner and the player many once hoped would pass Barry Bonds on the career home run list and be anointed baseball’s “clean” home run champion.
As loathsome as the serial liar and recidivist cheat “A-Rod” is, Selig was determined to give him a run for his unethical money. He enlisted MLB’s “investigative team,” consisting of dozens of former police officers and even a head of the Secret Service, to nail the slugger at any cost—and baseball’s private cops would engage in plenty of legally questionable tactics to do it. Though the “I-Team” would succeed in securing demonstrable proof of Rodriguez’s years of drug purchases from Biogenesis, baseball would have to consort with known criminals, sometimes paying them cash for stolen documents in shady backroom deals, to preserve the “integrity” of the game.
Pessah describes these efforts by Selig as having an ironic effect. Rodriguez’s legacy was already irreparably damaged, his name mud. But Selig’s personal quest to nail the fallen star only kept steroids and baseball prominently featured in the headlines for longer than they otherwise would have been.
Since the 1994 strike, baseball has enjoyed zero work stoppages. Players’ salaries continue to rise, but so do team revenues. Though he’s especially rough on Selig, Pessah ultimately credits him, Steinbrenner, and Fehr as titans of their time, all worthy of the sport’s Hall of Fame.
But with a fan base that grows older by the season, will future generations care about a game with a deliberately leisurely pace, one that has thus far failed to market its newest stars as effectively as the National Football League and National Basketball Association? Will they be entertained by the markedly decreased offensive output of the post-steroid era? Has the age of publicly subsidized stadiums finally come to a merciful end?
The Game can’t answer those questions, but it can help explain how we got here. This fascinating book demonstrates how an uneasy marriage of punitive socialism and barely restrained capitalism made MLB more profitable than it had ever been but left its future cloudy and uncertain.
The number one single today in 1956:
Britain’s number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1962:
Today in 1964, a fan at a Rolling Stones concert in Cleveland fell out of the balcony. That prompted Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locker to ban pop music concerts in the city, saying, “Such groups do not add to the community’s culture or entertainment.” Kind of ironic that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ended up in Cleveland.
Mike Rowe was asked …
‘Hello Mr. Rowe! What’s your take on MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry being offended by the phrase “hard worker”? How can such a label possibly be offensive to anyone?”
… and observed:
… there is no longer a limit to what people can be offended by.
Melissa Harris-Perry appears to be put off by the suggestion that “hard work” is too often linked with success. She doesn’t like the fact that many hard-working individuals have not enjoyed the same measure of success as Speaker Ryan, who was being acknowledged on her show for his excellent work ethic. Here is her response, in her own words…
HARRIS-PERRY: “I want us to be super careful when we use the language “hard worker.” I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work really looks like. But in the context of relative privilege, when you talk about work-life balance, the moms who don’t have health care aren’t called hard workers. We call them failures. We call them people who are sucking off the system.”
To me, it sounds as though Melissa is displaying images of slavery or drudgery in her office to remind herself of what hard work really and truly looks like. That’s a bit like hanging images of rape and bondage to better illustrate the true nature of human sexuality. Whatever her logic might be, it’s difficult to respond without first pointing out a few things that most people will find screamingly obvious. So let’s do that.
First of all, slavery is not “hard work;” it’s forced labor. There’s a big difference. Likewise, slaves are not workers; they are by definition, property. They have no freedom, no hope, and no rights. Yes, they work hard, obviously. But there can be no “work ethic” among slaves, because the slave has no choice in the matter.
Workers on the other hand, have free will. They are free to work as hard as they wish. Or not. The choice is theirs. And their decision to work hard, or not, is not a function of compliance or coercion; it’s a reflection of character and ambition.
This business of conflating hard work with forced labor not only minimizes the importance of a decent work ethic, it diminishes the unspeakable horror of slavery. Unfortunately, people do this all the time. We routinely describe bosses as “slave-drivers,” and paychecks as “slave’s wages.” Melissa though, has come at it from the other side. She’s suggesting that because certain “hard workers” are not as prosperous as other “hard workers,” – like the people on her office wall – we should all be “super-careful” about overly-praising hard work.
I suspect this is because Melissa believes – as do many others – that success today is mostly a function of what she calls, “relative privilege.” This is fancy talk for the simple fact that life is unfair, and some people are born with more advantages than others. It’s also a fine way to prepare the unsuspecting viewer for the extraordinary suggestion that slavery is proof-positive that hard work doesn’t pay off.
Obviously, I don’t see the world the same way as Melissa, but we do have something in common. Like her, I keep a picture on my office wall.
That’s me, squatting next to the most disappointing toilet I’ve ever encountered, preparing to clean it out with a garden trowel. I keep it there to remind me of what happens when you need a plumber but can’t find one.
It’s also a nice reminder that a good plumber these days has a hell of a lot more job security than the average news anchor. (With respect.)
Wisconsinites know that the first radio station was what now is WHA in Madison. Today in 1920, the nation’s first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air.
The number one British single today in 1956 is the only number one song cowritten by a vice president, Charles Dawes:
The number one song today in 1974:
The number one British album today in 1985 was Simple Minds’ “Once Upon a Time” …
We begin with a non-music anniversary: Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau was created, later to become the National Weather Service.
Tomorrow in 1870, the first complaints were made about the Weather Bureau’s being wrong about its forecast.
Today in 1946, two New York radio stations changed call letters. WABC, owned by CBS, became (natch) WCBS, paving the way for WJZ, owned by ABC, to become (natch) WABC seven years later. WEAF changed its call letters to WNBC.
Today in 1963, Ed Sullivan was at Heathrow Airport in London just as the Beatles deplaned to a crowd of screaming fans and a mob of journalists and photographers.
Intrigued, Sullivan decided to investigate getting the Beatles onto his show.
Today in 1964, Ray Charles was arrested at Logan Airport in Boston and charged with heroin. Charles was sentenced to one year probation after he kicked the horse.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 