Generally speaking, a combination of lack of information technology and slow and poor democratic institutions suggests to me that a free and competitive market is the most useful starting point. I’m in favour of markets as a form of information exchange.
One of the current problems is at the moment is that free markets are concentrating money and therefore economic and therefore political and cultural power in the hands of a few. These are solvable problems if we wish to solve them and they don’t necessarily require non-free or non-market forms of information exchange. I think markets become much less democratic very quickly when the participants are significantly unequal.
I’d be in favour of what I would call demarchy with more mutuals, more co-opts, more local and more powerful local government, more direct democracy but we don’t seem willing to invest in the bandwidth.
Free markets are the least bad way we have found so far, for collectively working out what people want and what they are prepared to do once we started living in communities that were too large to get everyone in to the same room.
Specifically for football, the above and I see no compelling reason to change. It’s not important enough to warrant government regulation. It’s not a necessity. It’s not a natural monopoly. It doesn’t control flows of information or opinion. The economic actors are sufficiently autonomous that a failure of one is unlikely to lead to a cascade failure in the wider market, industry or the whole economy. There don’t seem to me to be ethical issues inherent in football (or sports more widely) that warrant government regulation that aren’t already subject to regulation.
My distaste for the private lives and consumption habits of many footballers doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason for me to meddle in their business. Particularly as a likely side effect of my meddling is that I would make the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Glazier brothers richer.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 11:51 am (UTC)One of the current problems is at the moment is that free markets are concentrating money and therefore economic and therefore political and cultural power in the hands of a few. These are solvable problems if we wish to solve them and they don’t necessarily require non-free or non-market forms of information exchange. I think markets become much less democratic very quickly when the participants are significantly unequal.
I’d be in favour of what I would call demarchy with more mutuals, more co-opts, more local and more powerful local government, more direct democracy but we don’t seem willing to invest in the bandwidth.
Free markets are the least bad way we have found so far, for collectively working out what people want and what they are prepared to do once we started living in communities that were too large to get everyone in to the same room.
Specifically for football, the above and I see no compelling reason to change. It’s not important enough to warrant government regulation. It’s not a necessity. It’s not a natural monopoly. It doesn’t control flows of information or opinion. The economic actors are sufficiently autonomous that a failure of one is unlikely to lead to a cascade failure in the wider market, industry or the whole economy. There don’t seem to me to be ethical issues inherent in football (or sports more widely) that warrant government regulation that aren’t already subject to regulation.
My distaste for the private lives and consumption habits of many footballers doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason for me to meddle in their business. Particularly as a likely side effect of my meddling is that I would make the likes of Rupert Murdoch or the Glazier brothers richer.