Do NFL players get paid to much?

Answer 1

This is a question of market economics, not football. The simple rule of thumb in a free market is that you are 'worth' whatever you can freely convince someone else to pay for your services without resorting to fraud or coercion. A professional sports player is an entertainer who entertains MILLIONS of people each game. That is a valuable service, and people are willing to pay (quite handsomely) for that service. Should the ownership be the only ones to benefit from those payments and should the players who work maniacally and risk debilitating injury not get their share of that bounty? Granted, the ownership took the personal financial risk to set up the business, and should reap handsome rewards as well, but the idea that sports stars are overpaid must mean that sports businessmen are underpaid or that people should stop paying for entertainment. I think most people would laugh at the former idea (that the owners are under-compensated), and the latter (that people are wrong to pay for entertainment) is interfering with people's free choice. Another way to look at it is scarcity. A sports star earns more since they are selling a very rare skill...these people are the pinnacle of the elite at doing what they do. The pro sports player is entertaining with a skill that is extremely rare, and basic high school economics tells us that the price for a thing is inversely related to the supply of that thing. The pro sports athlete is a rare commodity for how good he is, and thus he is a valuable commodity and his services will be priced accordingly. It is common for people to contrast the societal good of a school teacher with a pro athlete or actor. But this subjective analysis is not how free markets allocate resources. There is a potentially huge supply of teachers. It is a very important job, but the teacher is easily replaceable. There is no shortage of people wanting to teach, nor who could do so with a skill level very similar to those already employed in the job with perhaps a minimal amount of training and experience. Thus the market weighs the high availability of people who could do the job of teacher vs the fantastically rare commodity of a pro sports entertainer. It does not make subjective evaluations, but relies on the objective issue of scarcity. A diamond is valuable not merely because it is pretty (cubic zirconium is equally pretty), but because it is rare. Societies that attempt to function around subjective evaluations of perceived value rather than the cold, objective rationalizing of the market tend to encounter shortages and other problems. Socialist economies are based on such reasoning (among other problems), and of course, we can now look back and see that Socialist economies have a 100% failure rate. The few still in operation are so only because wealthier neighbors or allies are pumping money into them to keep them afloat as Venezuela does with Cuba, or China and South Korea do with North Korea. Anyway, that's how freedom works. Please take care not to break it. It took thousands of years of human history to get here, and it would kind of suck if we let our subjective instincts ruin the really good thing we've got going.