When socialism is capitalism

Reading the New York Times article about the new stadium that the Yankees are building, I was really annoyed by the following bit of subtle editorializing by the article's author:

The Yankees’ bottom line is also hammered because the team, like the Mets and Red Sox, must pay millions of dollars to prop up less-prosperous teams. Effectively penalized for their success, the Yankees have become a symbol of baseball’s partially inverted economics.

PENALIZED?! I don't think so. As much as the fans of all the money-making teams* may complain, this is not done out of some commie pinko hand-holding notion of equality and fairness.

No, it's done out of that second priority of capitalism (the first being: make money): create a quality product. As attractive as it may seem to Yankees fans to have a team that wins EVERY year, this scenario will eventually create an MLB that will eventually collapse out of sheer boredom. Leagues where the same team wins every year and smaller market teams have zero shot at even competing do not compete in the marketplace. If Yankees fans (like the article's writer transparently is) really want the Yankees to be year-after-year champions of an eight-team league that no one gives two shits about, then wish hard.

My venom is less about baseball than it is about football. The Jerry Joneses and Dan Snyders of the world say exactly the above: that their teams are being "penalized for being successful." They want to spend all their dough on free agents and create constant champs. They see the revenue sharing of the NFL as socialism and say (as Jerruh did recently) that the smaller market teams should be more creative in finding ways to make money. But what they completely miss is that any league without competition is one that will fail. And finding a quality product that will keep the bucks flowing year after year is about as capitalist as it gets.

* Though it may seem that I'm getting down on teams that aren't my own, the Houston Texans are, according to an article I read on the economics of the NFL, one of the top grossing teams, and therefore just as likely as the Redskins or Cowboys to go cuckoo bananas on free-agent spending and be good all the time.