Dear Steve Czaban: You’ve regularly referred to yourself as a “libertarian” on the radio. You seem to find libertarianism compatible with cheering on the FCC’s war on “indecency.” Your libertarianism precludes skepticism of the Massive Government Program known as war, too. Okay, so maybe for you libertarianism, which, crudely, we might gloss as “opposition to Big Government” is primarily economic in nature - “letting people keep more of their own money,” as I believe George W. Bush has put it. I know you like that guy, and you voted for him.

So, economics. Today, your local and national radio shows have been consumed with bitterness toward the DC Council for monkeying with the stadium deal DC Mayor Anthony Williams negotiated with Major League Baseball. Speaking as a “libertarian,” I heard a lot of stuff that was hard to take. Let me explain why, and why I think any true “libertarian” should agree with me.

I listen to your shows a lot, and one thing that comes through is that you have been really looking forward to attending major league baseball games here in your hometown area, something you haven’t ever been able to do, because, well, because when you were just a boy the Dallas Metro area lured the Washington Senators to Texas with a package of public spending incentives not dissimilar to the ersatz deal under discussion. By coincidence, a lot of that money ended up in the pockets of - George W. Bush. Apparently he gets to keep more of “your own money” too, if your money was earned in Texas. But let’s move right along.

To attend such games, you’ll pay for a ticket. Who am I kidding, you’re in sports radio. You’ll be comped. But let’s pretend you were the sort of baseball fan who has to buy his own seats for a bit. Even if you were paying for your ticket, you wouldn’t be paying for all of your ticket - that is, you wouldn’t be paying the full cost of attending a baseball game in Washington DC. Chadwick’s would be paying part of your ticket too.

You know Chadwick’s - there are a bunch of them around: Georgetown, Friendship Heights, Old Town in Alexandria, here and there. I’m not sure if the one on Captiva Island is the same company or not. There’s a Chadwick’s downstairs from my office, and in their windows they have posters that read “No DC Taxes for Baseball.” Self-interest on their part. One article I read says that those “biggest businesses in DC” that are the only ones the Mayor’s plan would tax include any businesses with annual revenue of four million dollars or more. Chadwick’s surely qualifies. I should note, by the way, that the company I work for must, too, though it has no official position on the stadium deal and I haven’t even heard our executives discuss it. I’d oppose the stadium deal anyway - I’m a libertarian, you see - but I must admit that I don’t like the idea of my employer taking on an additional tax burden. Taxes suck, Steve. That’s the attitude we libertarians take toward them. Some of us grudgingly agree that there’s no alternative to taxation of some sort, but even we think taxes should be “as low as possible” and as simple as possible.

So the only way on offer for you to go to baseball games in DC is for you to pay a certain amount of money for a ticket, and for Chadwick’s to pay a certain amount of money for your ticket too. That’s the deal, as stadium backers have said over and over again today. Here’s the thing, Steve: You haven’t earned Chadwick’s money. They earned it. You earned your money. Libertarianism wants the government to take the absolute minimum possible amount of your money away from you, to the extent it wants the government to take any of your money away at all. (Plenty of libertarians think that any is too much.) Libertarians also want the government to take the absolute minimum possible amount of Chadwick’s money away from them, because, like I said, they earned it. The government didn’t earn it and neither did you.

Steve, behind every tax is a gun. If you don’t believe me, try not paying. See how it goes. “Libertarians” can disagree on a lot, but the question of whether it’s okay for the District of Columbia to take money from Chadwick’s and give it to a consortium of billionaires so that your leisure time will be marginally more enjoyable is not a close call. You don’t deserve it. It’s not that you’re such a schlump. Nobody deserves it. It is not the legitimate function of any government, in libertarian eyes, to take money from one group of people and give it to another group of people (wealthier people, yet), to make a third group of people marginally happier. It’s wrong. That understates: it’s evil.

Now, if there were already a stadium here, paid for with the dollars of Chadwick’s restaurants, neither I nor most of your fellow libertarians would begrudge you a game. I might go to them now and then myself. Lots of libertarians think the roads should be owned by private, for-profit companies, but since the public roads are there, it’s what they drive on. But it’s not okay to insist on the deal in advance. It’s the difference between finding a twenty that some mugger dropped the other day and egging him on because you think he’ll settle some swag on you.

You say that if the Council doesn’t agree to pay full boat for a new stadium then there will be no baseball in Washington? Then there should be no baseball in Washington. Baseball is a frill. Libertarians oppose government spending on frills. It’s the District Government’s job to provide safe streets, reliable civil courts, honest criminal justice. (And what a job they’re doing with those things, eh?) It’s not the District’s job to provide MLB with a payday and sports fans with another way to spend their money. It’s not the District’s right to take Chadwick’s earnings to subsidize your entertainment.

At least, that’s the libertarian view.

UPDATE: More stadium-deal blogging at Unqualified Offerings: here and here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 at 10:50 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.