I have read nothing that would indicate the prospects for the National Basketball Association (NBA) playing this season are promising. My response? So.

To be perfectly fair and honest I have never been a big basketball fan to begin with. Like so many others I will watch a little when the playoffs come around. But you will sooner find me watching Justin Beiber than the NBA otherwise. It’s just not worth my time.

Why? The game experience has changed. This is not just the NBA, but all pro sports. It cost’s too much to attend a game. Free agency has turned every roster into a revolving door, where even the super stars move with the expiration of their current contract. And lastly, even figuring out what channel, what day, and what time your team plays has become a hassle.

When going to a game is too expensive; you say “Who?” when the starting lineup is announced; plus throw in the seemingly endless steams of pro athletes with some sort of  legal problem, and you get less overall interest in the game. The NBA is not only not immune, but recent attendance figures bare me out. NBA attendance peaked during the 2006-7 season at an average per game attendance of 17,757. They have been under that each of the last 4 seasons, dipping to 17,150 during the 2009-10 season.

http://www.apbr.org/attendance.html While that is not a huge drop, the point is that player salaries keep going up and interest in their product isn’t. And now they decide to put no product at all on the market. Not smart.

The situation boils down to this. The NBA owners claim poverty. The NBA players say “No Way”. The NBA fans, who are already a bit fickle, are left out in the cold. {Larry Coon does a good job of explaining this in detail here: http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=coon_larry&page=NBAFinancials-110630 ) Unfortunately for the Owners and Players alike, the fans have their blinders off and can see what they have been missing.

What would that be, you ask? Well, for the general sports fan, there is NFL and college football. There is the NHL. If they are dead set on basketball; the college game puts a damn good product on the court for a much cheaper price. There are the high school sports. There is lacrosse and even roller derby. If you don’t want sports, how about a movie? There is live theater on many levels at every NBA city in America. The list goes on and on.

The point is there is a lot of competition for the entertainment dollar of your NBA fan. That already fickle fan is also worried about paying his bills, keeping or finding a job, and how to pay for Christmas. How much sympathy do you think he has for how this group of people fighting on how to divide up the 4.1 billion they generate in basketball revenue?

The NFL understood this. They may have canceled half the preseason, but they got there heads on straight in time to save their regular season. Major League Baseball gets it. The players union and the owners just signed a new collective bargaining agreement a few days ago. That happened without any kind of disruption at all.

The NBA is not the NFL where people were filling airwaves with their disgust at the prospect of no pro ball. You would hear about it on regular talk radio. Not with the NBA. Their fans are barely noticing. What they might be noticing is that they can deal without it. If that ends up being the case, then maybe they NBA owners and players alike will fine out what it’s like to divide up nothing.

I don’t care if that happens or not. They should.

Other People’s Money

“The trouble with Socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money”

Margaret Thatcher-1976

Europe is running out of Other People’s money as we speak.

It started with Greece. In the spring of 2010 bond investors began demanding (refusing to buy if they didn’t get their way) higher interest rates to buy Greek bonds. Greece issues these bonds because they spend more money than they get via taxes.  Banks and other investors buy these bonds under the assumption that they will get all of their money back with interest. The amount of interest is determined, in part, by the confidence the lenders have that the money will be repaid. More confidence in repayment equals a lower interest rate. When confidence in repayment is not so high, investors want more interest for the risk they take.

Once those interest rates get to a certain level; the countries with very high debt (Greece was the first, followed by Ireland, Portugal, and now Italy is up to bat) can not afford the payments. It’s like when you or I go to buy a car. When the interest rate is 5% we can manage the payments. When the interest is 20% we have to buy a cheaper car.

Most European countries have to buy the expensive car. They have promised their citizens they would. They promise Other People’s money in the form of free healthcare, government child support for single parents, subsidized childcare, cash payments based on the number of children in a household, retirement ages in the 50s, and they have mandated that employers provide benefits such as four weeks of paid vacation, even to part time employees. It is politically difficult, bordering on impossible, to take the benefits back, or to use the analogy above, buy a cheaper car.

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the methods of the Occupy Wall Street crowd are the exact same as the archetypical two-year-old that does not get his way. He stomps his feet, yells, cries, and makes a spectacle of himself. He does this by ransoming something that he has stolen; namely the peace and quiet. Or was that Zuccotti Park? What other explanation fits the actions of these people? The two year old will pee where ever is convenient. He will question authority at every turn with the constant stream of “The Whole World is Watching’, or “No! No!”.  He will refuse to clean up after himself, leaving his pizza boxes and toys, for the adults to clean up. He hates to take a bath. He demands unreasonable things, like complete debt forgiveness or a pony. The actions are mirror images. You can’t tell one from the other.

You ask yourself, “But does it work for the two-year-old protester? I mean that is the test isn’t it?  If parents lack the will to discipline the illegal, I mean, bad behavior. If he gets support from the media or an outsider telling Mommy to “Just give him the cookie!” If he is allowed to make a big enough scene that either acquiescence to his demands are now the most political and quickest option. Then, yes, it can work.

The police and Mommy have tried what I see so often in the local Wal-Mart; ignore junior and hope he stops peeing in the park. Usually the results of that action play out the same way. When the foot stomping, the breath holding and chanting “Human Need. Not Corporate Greed”, doesn’t get him the results he wants, junior will soon take up violence. He will slap at Mommy’s leg or try to shut down the Oakland ports. Then to get junior back on the straight and narrow, a larger response is needed from Mommy. Something like a stern scolding, a swat on the behind, or tear gas. As every supermarket observer could tell Mommy, it is easily avoided. If the first time junior violated the rules by pitching his tent and smoking grass, he was given the aforementioned pop on backside, or promptly arrested, prosecuted and punished. He would probably find a more constructive way to work toward societal change, or to get that cookie. The two year olds actions are selfish and born out of immaturity. The OWS actions are selfish and immature.