Another good read

[mithriltabby]

A segment on Bill Moyers’ Journal sufficiently intrigued me that I picked up a copy of David Cay Johnston’s Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest American Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Johnston packs a lot of eye-opening data into this book, taking on major league sports, eminent domain abuse, health care, the laws touted to taxpayers as “deregulation”, and more. He calls upon both Adam Smith and the Bible to damn both Democrats and Republicans that have forsaken their duty to the people. There are many surprises— for instance, I had no idea that baseball was exempt from antitrust law and that big-league sports were not, overall, profitable without subsidies and tax breaks.

I had thought that I had accumulated enough cynicism in the past 8 years that I was pretty much tapped out on moral outrage, but this book managed to blow oxygen on the few embers I have left. This book makes it abundantly clear that for all the talk in Washington of the glories of the free market, we have nothing resembling one here in the United States.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

big-league sports were not, overall, profitable without subsidies and tax breaks.

*nids* We had a big controversy about this in Oregon a couple of years ago, where it was thankfully decided that just because baseball is "an all American game" and several major legislators are big baseball fans, is not sufficient reason to get a Portland major league team, which turned out to involve truly massive amounts of public money, especially from a state as relatively small as Oregon. As far as I can tell, the entiriety of major league sports are a vast con job that suck up huge amounts of public money for no useful purpose. Some legislators are convinced to support it because of outright lies the promise how much money it will bring to the state or city, others because they are either naive or overly dedicated fans, and some because they manage to get a cut.