Are pro athletes paid too much?

No

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by Brian Pears

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Before one can consider this question, one must notice that the question itself is vague. Without knowing whether athletes are paid too much relative to some person or some group, a person pondering this is forced to fill in the blanks themselves.

Oh, and how people love to fill in blanks! Into the emptiness, those who answer "yes" will throw all sorts of professions deemed to be far nobler than athlete: teacher, doctor, fire fighter, stay-at-home mom...the list can go on and on, with nearly no end to the number of professions that are "worth more" than athlete. Nearly all "yes" answers involve comparing athletes to other workers.

That's where those arguing yes give themselves away. In volunteering those other professions, they are equating monetary compensation with value to society. Take that argument to its logical conclusion and one fears that the affirmatives are endorsing a system in which people performing jobs deemed most important to society would be paid the most, with those merely entertaining us paid the least.

That logic can be deconstructed in a number of ways.

The first is probably the most obvious: those saying yes are comparing apples to oranges. Said differently, what does an athlete's compensation have to do with a policeman's? Do civil servants make the wages they do because athletes deny them money? In other words, is the aggregate compensation scheme in this country a zero-sum game, where football players are in effect hoarding money that rightfully belongs to someone else?

Those questions are of course rhetorical. Society does not arrive at a civil servant's compensation in the same way that a professional sports team decides how to pay its employees. The idea that capitalist societies as a rule do not pay their civil servants enough money relative to their value is likely is certainly worth debating. But it has absolutely nothing to do with how athletes are paid.

But those that believe athletes are paid too much are not deterred by the fact that they compare apples to oranges. To them, teachers are a priori more valuable. That "fact" is sufficient enough to declare that athletes are overpaid simply because they make more than teachers while merely playing a game.

Their belief begs a question: who decides what jobs are most valuable to society? Ask a teacher and they'll say teachers, of course. Most people probably would. But a high-school dropout might rank them a bit lower on the scale. Same with the police, especially if the person being asked is a criminal.

As a society, we could never agree as a collective what jobs we valued most. Clearly, society needs a whole host of other civil services like law enforcement, fire protection, and education in order to survive. That is beyond argument. But we could never decide which were most important, let alone decide how to compensate them based on a subjective value.

Besides, professions like those are in a separate category. They are not economic entities. They do not produce revenue. They do not create wealth that can be taxed. The services they provide are a cost to society. Clearly, to speak of the incredible work a fire fighter performs as a cost is not meant to demean all they do. Their work involves self-sacrifice and often heroism, and it is worth a lot to the rest of us.

However, in purely economic terms, those services are costs. We compensate the public sector as a society, and the private sector takes care of itself. Truth be told, the private sector greatly subsidizes the public sector. The taxes paid by the corporations and even the athletes within the multi-billion dollar professional sports industry contribute measurably to our ability as a society to pay for the services we need. These athletes do their part to create the wealth that becomes the base from which we pay our public servants. Instead of compensation being a zero-sum game, in fact it becomes one where the more money an athlete makes, the more he returns it to society in the form of taxes.

Finally, even without making inaccurate comparisons to other types of workers, those that bemoan the pay that athletes receive tend to be indiscriminate in their criticism. The stereotype of rich, overpaid athlete is as bogus as any stereotype. Exceptions abound. In America, professional athletes in fringe sports like lacrosse are not well-paid. Female athletes are rarely paid large sums. Even male American soccer players, competing in the world's most popular sport, rarely make huge salaries.

All is not as it seems even for athletes in the biggest revenue-producing sports like football and baseball. The majority of players are not embarrassingly wealthy, especially when compared to the vast revenue their teams often pull in. Rookies in any sport are often bound to wage scales, so that even if they vastly outperform older players, they are often paid a fraction of their older teammates' salaries. Veterans have peak earning years (if they last beyond the relatively short tenures most athletes have in any sport), but once those years have passed, players are unceremoniously cast aside. Finally, compared to other industries, athletes have very short careers, and only a handful can turn their athletic experience into lucrative second careers.

Like it or not, in a free market economy, people are generally paid in accordance with the economic value they create. We know that society values athletics: millions of fans pay billions of dollars of revenue to keep these sports going. We will know when society values sports differently when we see revenue drop dramatically, and at that point, so too will player salaries drop. But for now, we are buying what they are selling, and voraciously so.

Disagree if you want with our capitalist system. Complain if you will that it does not adequately value the public sector. Your argument has nothing to do with private sector compensation, but you have a point. But if you do complain, you'll need to come up with a different way to value the work that all workers do, one that does not put their economic value first and their "usefulness" to society second.

Before you answer, I'd like to remind you that someone beat you to the punch. Unfortunately, Karl Marx's vision didn't quite turn out as he planned.

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