World Cup Woe

To get more of something, subsidize it.

An easy enough platitude, yes? Subsidies sound great when the thing subsidized is something everybody wants. Or something enough people want to justify the burden slung on the shoulders of the unwilling. Isn't that the purpose of taxation? To get the free riders to start pedaling? And hey, who doesn't like futbol? What are you, a Yanqui?


 

TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Subsidies aren't free money. They are transfers, often from poor to rich. If professional sports aren't euvoluntary enough to survive on their own merits, then maybe more of us should hit the big orgs like FIFA, the NFL, and the NCAA where it hurts: right smack dab in the pocketbook. We may not have favelas in the States, but we do have a large, nearly unanimous literature that clearly states: "independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development." (Siegfried & Zimbalist, JEP 2000)

We're paying for this through taxes why, exactly?