NFL Concussions And Lance Armstrong–Market Solutions, Not Regulation

There has been an increasing focus on concussions in the NFL, and the furor has quickly reached down to Pop Warner, a youth football organization.  Coaches are anxiously looking into the eyes of little five-year-olds and 250 lb. running backs with the same concern over lawsuits.  For years American football’s ethos was ‘man up’, shake it off, get back in there, take another hit for the team, etc., and no one paid attention to the brain-rattling injuries that were occurring. Foggy athletes who were helped off the field were more or less themselves the next day, so who knew that they couldn’t remember the name of their Aunt Sadie?.  If any one of us had given this issue half a thought, we would have realized that the brains of football behemoths get banged around their craniums just like punch drunk boxers.

Now that the issue is out in the open, the NFL and its shill, ESPN, are scrambling for answers.  In the past few Sundays, a number of key players have gotten clocked and been forced out of important games because of new league rules. The Sean Payton New Orleans Saints affair where athletes and team management were fined and censured for bounty-hunting – bonuses for coldcocking quarterbacks – was the last straw.

Executives at both corporations are shaking their heads at the concussion flap.  They know that only a tiny fraction of NFL athletes out of the thousands who had played have ever suffered mental decline because of football.  More importantly they know that the crowds love the mayhem and violence.  NFL fans love the bone-shattering, brain rattling, head-on train crashes of the National Football League. Professional football is a blood sport.

Football may not be quite like NASCAR where millions of fans watch souped-up versions of their own boring Chevys and Camrys go ‘round and ‘round until they eventually crash in a metal-shredding pile-up, hit the wall at 200 mph, or explode in a nuclear fireball; but it is close. Most NFL fans do love the intricacy, the complexity, and the athletic skill; but boy, do they ever love those hits.  “That’ll make the highlights”, say the announcers when the train wreck happens, bodies are strewn on the turf, and the ambulance crew rushes in. Without the carnage, the NFL would be like Major League Soccer – bo-ring.

The League, however, has bowed to the outcry of the concerned, and instituted and enforced concussion rules which are currently so conservative that the loss of at least one player per game is assured.  Owners who want the on-field brutality to continue, but who see the legal vultures perched high up on stadium parapets ready to chase the ambulances that cart off franchise players, are – at least for the time being – keeping their mouths shut.

Here is where I am perplexed.  Everyone knows that there is a good chance of someone getting their clocks cleaned in every single NFL game.  The League knows it, the owners know it, the coaches know it, and the players know it.  Is there any dearth of young athletes who risk everything in high school to play at a top Division 1 team? Or any college player who doesn’t try to excel and bruise and maim others along the way?  Of course not. 

If they know the risks and we know the risks, then why all this fuss?  We are all complicit in the blood and dementia, and no one seems to mind except ‘The Concerned’ – the well-meaning vigilantes of American society who want to expunge any risk, any danger, any compromise to a long life and the pursuit of happiness.  The same people who want to remove slides and monkey bars from playgrounds and force bike helmets on 3-year olds on tricycles on vernal park paths. 

I don’t see the need for any regulation because of this three-way contract – owners, players, and fans – works just fine; but if something must be done, then put a warning message on every ticket and every TV broadcast and in every professional contract.  “THIS SPORT IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.  It can cause physical damage and mental impairment.  Play at your own risk”.  The market would then regulate the game.  Top athletes might opt for soccer; fans might turn to golf and tennis; and the NFL might morph into a violence-free and elegant game of touch.

Which brings me to Lance Armstrong and the issue of doping.  For years it was assumed that at least some athletes in most sports doped.  Although many baseball fans had convenient amnesia while watching Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa bash more home runs than ever thought possible, or admiring weak slap-single players who now lashed dingers to all fields.  Most knew what was going on, but guess what?  They didn’t care.  The sound of a cannon report as the bat of Mighty Joe Young crushed the ball; the majestic arc of the trajectory of the ball as it flew over 450 ft., and the sound of it rattling around the empty nose-bleed seats high the upper upper deck were thrilling.

My solution, rather than simply ratchet up the blood-snooping or make the cat-and-mouse game more challenging, is to issue the same NFL-type warning to fans:  BE ADVISED - ATHLETES IN THE SPORT YOU ARE WATCHING ARE DOPING. And for athletes: WARNING! DOPING CAN SHRINK YOUR BALLS, CAUSE HEART FAILURE AND HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE. 

Some fans will not watching the Tour de France because it is doped.  Others will watch with increased enthusiasm because they will see even greater feats of strength; but the fans will decide.  Similarly, many cyclists will drop out and head for the golf links, while others will take the risk.  “A few years can’t hurt”, they will argue to themselves, “and besides, the money’s good.”

So, let it be.  Let the blood sports continue.  Let’s stop reining in hockey enforcers.  Once they are aware of the risk and sign on to the program, let ‘em go at it. Let NFL knuckle-draggers club each other silly.  Put no speed governors on race cars. 

Let there be room in an increasing nanny state for at least one unregulated, untamed, undisciplined outlet for the mayhem and violence in all of us.  Hey, at least someone else is committing the brutality. 

Nostalgia For the Fifties–Bad Idea

Paul Krugman has written a paean to the 1950s (The Twinkie Manifesto, New York Times 11.18.12), suggesting that in that idyllic era we all lived with high tax rates and enjoyed a booming economy.  Therefore, says Krugman, the current conservative rhetoric that preaches lower taxes for the wealthy produces higher economic growth is simply wrong.

In the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Not only that, the Labor Movement was at its strongest and most muscular:

In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.

Not so fast say critics like Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute Brink Lindsey (CATO@Liberty 11.19.12). Correlation is not causation.  

Economic performance is a function of both economic policies and the underlying conditions for growth. When conditions are highly favorable (as, in China’s case, when relative backwardness creates the possibility for rapid catch-up growth), even fairly bad policies (like China’s) can produce good results. And it turns out that the conditions in the United States during the early post-WWII decades were highly favorable indeed.

But several factors were especially conducive to strong performance at that time. There was a pent-up demand for goods and services after the privations of the Great Depression and the mobilization of World War II. There was also a pent-up supply of new products that couldn’t be brought to market during the depression and war years. That pent-up supply was augmented by technological and organizational breakthroughs accelerated by the imperatives of total war.

Big advances in transportation, communications, and air conditioning stimulated catch-up growth in the underdeveloped South and under-populated West. And rapid upgrades in human capital (first explosive growth in high school graduates, then explosive growth in college graduates) doubtless helped to spur productivity gains.

The reason why taxes were so high was because they could be.  The economy was booming to such a degree that taxing both wealthy and non-wealthy alike was unlikely to slow down production or consumption. The Federal Government, always anxious to tap the public for some spare change, was no different in the Fifties than today. 

Krugman talks winsomely about the corporate executives “serving an array of ‘stakeholders’ as opposed to merely serving stockholders”, implying that in the Golden Fifties there was a harmony between corporate executives and labor leaders.  Nothing could be farther from the truth. The labor movement had victories because business, flush with new money, felt that it was easier to pay off union bosses than to fight them. There was then and there always will be a dynamic struggle, a la Marx between labor and capital.  The only problem is that capital is winning.  Labor, bloated with its early successes, and convinced that capitalists were patsies, proceeded to extract more and more resources from business with big-muscle tactics until the tide turned, and it missed the conservative, free market, right-to-work boat.

Krugman falls into another correlation-causation trap.  He says that in the 1950s corporate executives lived in modest homes compared to the garish, baroque pleasure palaces of today.  That was because, argues Krugman, that high taxes reined in otherwise crass and venal interests and used the money for more appropriate social ends. Let is forget for a moment the patronizing sentiments expressed by Krugman – that government has more taste than fat cat capitalists eager to spend and display their wealth in showy, glitzy ways and should regulate that ignorant tendency.  

One reason why CEOs and their Boards of Directors lived in the modest homes of Fairfield County, Connecticut, or Grosse Pointe was because they were members of the WASP elite for whom any crass show of wealth was beneath them and simply not done.  Their houses were simple frame or brick – yes, set on a large acreage, but well-landscaped and-designed – and their second homes on Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, or the Upper Peninsula were rough-hewn, integrated into the landscape and above all, tasteful.  This was the WASP culture of the 50s.  Higher taxes most definitely did not force these corporate executives into modesty.

Cato’s Lindsey notes that the Fifties soon turned to the Miserable Seventies, which thanks to tax reform among other factors, the economy returned to boom times: 

When conditions for growth become less favorable, performance deteriorates and pressure builds for new policies. Which is exactly what we saw in the 1970s: stagflation, followed by the dismantling of price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, financial, and communications sectors and a steep drop in marginal tax rates. Together with disinflationary monetary policy, those reforms helped to unleash the Long Boom of the ’80s and ’90s.

Krugman can’t just let his Golden Fifties lie, and he has to get in one more paternalistic platitude:

There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.

We are a morally better nation thanks to the likes of Krugman who have made a living by excoriating the wealthy and by lionizing the poor, the disadvantaged, and the excluded.  If anything, we are a morally inferior nation with greed and unalloyed individualism rampant, accountability and responsibility forgotten from boardrooms to the inner city…Sorry, I, like Krugman, can get carried away.

The Nature Of Evil V

In another in her continuing series on the nature of evil, Clare Carlisle has focused on Adolf Eichmann, the “German Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel who was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. (Wikipedia)”.

Eichmann fled to Argentina after the War, but was captured by Israel agents and brought back to Israel to stand trial.

“Hannah Arendt – a German Jew who had fled from the Nazi regime in the 1930s – wrote about Eichmann's trial in a series of articles for the New Yorker, and in 1963 she published a book-length account entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”

The phrase ‘the banality of evil’ came to be associated with the Holocaust because it summarized the fact that otherwise ordinary people participated directly or indirectly, openly or with complicity, in the mass extermination of the Jews. 

“Like the psychologists who examined Eichmann, Arendt was struck by his ordinariness. Indeed, he appeared to be a caring husband, father, brother, son and friend.”

This is what most terrified Arendt – that supposedly normal, ordinary people could be capable of such horrific crimes.  The horror of the Holocaust was not only that six million Jews perished, but that ‘ordinary’ people executed them willingly.  What did this say about human nature or the human condition? asked Arendt.  The question has persisted until this day.  Recently Jonah Goldhagen has written in Hitler’s Willing Executioners that without the complicity of ordinary Germans the Holocaust would not have taken place.  Other critics have suggested that because of the political strategy of Hitler, the extermination of the Jews was decentralized, broken up, and therefore difficult to reconstruct as the Final Solution that it was. No exterminations were carried out in Germany, so the gas chambers and ovens of Poland were very distant and remote. In other words Germans might have suspected, but they didn’t know. 

Some Germans may have felt intimidated and afraid to speak out and risk punishment, imprisonment or death; others may have felt that it was not their affair – they didn’t conceive of the plan and they might not even approve of it, but they simply had to accept what their government was doing.  Those within the lower echelons of the Nazi hierarchy often claimed that they were just following orders; and that the order and discipline of the military required rigid and unwavering obedience. Many Germans who knew of the Nazi plan were simply not courageous enough to shelter Jews as the Danes and some Dutch did.  Such courage is beyond the perspective and strength of most people.

Goldhagen and others writing from his perspective insist that Germans simply had to know.  A program so devilish, so extensive, and so relentless could never have been totally kept from public knowledge. 

The complicity of the common man is one thing, but what about those who designed and carried out the Final Solution?  They knew full well what the goal of Hitler’s program was – the total annihilation of the Jewish people.  Following orders did not apply here as a reason for participating, for Nazis like Eichmann not only participated in the program, they enthusiastically embraced it and zealously pursued it.

Eichmann is a particularly interesting case because he read and was convinced of the philosophical arguments of Kant, an influential German moral philosopher.

The Kantian "categorical imperative" expresses a moral principle that is entirely free of personal, self-centered inclinations. In respecting only rules that should be valid for everyone, the moral person refuses to put his own interests before anyone else's, or to value his own freedom more highly than another's. His morality is guided by respect for humanity itself – for human dignity, which is based on human freedom.

In other words Kant believed that there were such things as moral principles which transcended any individual considerations of right and wrong actions. A rule that is valid for everyone is by nature a higher law and ought to be universally respected.  One assumes that ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ is one of these moral precepts – it is universal, stands above all other personal and venal considerations, and has the force of true, unalloyed principle.  Eichmann believed Kant, but apparently drew his own conclusions.

This is not hard to understand.  Despite Kantian and Biblical injunctions, there will always be interpretations of Moses’ Commandment.  We accept without too much debate public executions for murder.  Many fundamentalist Christians believe that abortion is also murder.  War for a just cause is not murder, etc. In other words, although there may be a categorical imperative, it will always be weakened by interpretation.  Society should always keep this imperative in mind, for it serves as touchstone and reminder in an increasingly complex world where individual action is becoming much more important than collective responsibility.

Eichmann followed the teachings of Kant up to a point and then no more:

Until 1942, said Eichmann, he had tried to live his life according to this Kantian moral principle. (This presumably includes his active involvement, from the early 1930s, with the Nazi party and the SS.) When he was given the task of deporting the Jews, however, he found that he could no longer follow this ethical ideal. He suggested that his freedom was taken away, so that he could not – in Kantian terms – be a moral agent at all: "Now I was trying to come to terms with myself, and I saw that I was unable to change anything and unable to do anything. I said to myself: 'I cannot for the present live entirely according to [the Kantian requirement], although I would like to do so.'"

It is even more difficult to understand the crimes of Eichmann because of his reading of and respect for Kant.  At least he thought about moral action, we say.  Obviously, as for most of us, philosophical guidance has meaning only until our own lives are at stake.

At his trial Eichmann talked about finding himself in a "new" and "unprecedented" political situation. On his account, this brought about a fundamental moral disorientation: "There is no possibility of comparisons, and no one can have any idea of how it was. There was the war. I had to do just one thing." These words are chilling, but they are also tragic. "Just one thing" describes totalitarianism on a personal scale, the reduction of a single life to one horrifying purpose that excludes all other considerations – including morality, and humanity itself.

Eichmann’s moral failings have to be ours because he was an ordinary man.  If he could do what he did, then could we.  That is the most frightening conclusion of all.