George Will vs. All that is good and decent

George Will can go on and on in his syndnicated column maligning liberals, Bill Clinton (still) and many other things about America I hold dear, but when he starts maligning the Yankees, it has gone too far:

The Yankees' payroll of $206.4 million (not including the almost $30 million tax paid to MLB on the portion of the payroll over $136.5 million) is 2.4 times the Tigers' payroll. The Yankees' third baseman earns 68.7 times the salary of the Mets' all-star third baseman (Alex Rodriguez, $25.7 million; David Wright, $374,000). The shortstop makes approximately what the Marlins' team makes (Derek Jeter, $20.6 million; Marlins, $20.68 million). But the 2006 Yankees did baseball -- and the rest of America, if it learns the larger social lesson of the story -- the favor of demonstrating the steeply declining utility of the last $100 million of payroll.

New York, the world's financial capital, takes money very seriously. And New York has been the intellectual epicenter of political liberalism, which has consistently preached, and has consistently disproved, the efficacy of pitching large sums at social problems. In the city where America's welfare state was first imagined and implemented, the entitlement mentality bred by the welfare state includes the assumption that the Yankees are entitled to be in the World Series, which they have not been since -- gasp -- 2003.

Let me get this straight: Yankees equal lavish spending, liberalism equals lavish spending, so the Yankees' failure to reach the ALCS is akin to the failure of government spending to solve intractable social programs. Cute. Let's take this one apart.

Surely, George Will doesn't expect the highest-paid team in baseball to win the World Series every year, whether it's the Yankees or not. If it were some sort of formula, the game wouldn't be fun to watch. Why would anyone pay good money to see the Yankees in a regular-season game if the outcome was decided to such an extent by payroll? People love sports because anything can happen within the confines of the field. Regular people brush up against old-boy networks, lack of money to get a foot in the door and all manner of other barriers to success. On the field, any scrub called up from AAA the week before can be a hero on any particular night.

That being said, money helps, but such is the nature of capitalism, something George Will should support wholeheartedly. The Cubs don't have to win to pack the stadium: most people will go to games because of the social aspects above all else. This doesn't work when your stadium is in the South Bronx and when another professional baseball team is across town.

Besides, it's not like all of the money George Steinbrenner has spent over the last decade has gone to waste. The failure to get more than one round in the playoffs isn't something a lot of teams who haven't made the postseason in years have to worry about. All of those tickertape parades down Broadway during the 1990s aren't forgotten - that's money well spent.

Since the traditional canards about the free-spending Yankees are such laughable products of envy on their face, let's move on to a more believable piece of hooey: History hasn't "consistently disproved" that social spending doesn't work. Thanks to Social Security, elderly poverty has decreased from 35.2 percent in 1959 to 10.2 percent in 2003. Well thought-out single payer (government-funded) healthcare systems take up a smaller percentage of national spending and produce better outcomes in the aggregate.

That being said, it is correct to state that throwing money at a problem is no guarantee that the problem will go away. One only needs to look at the billions in foreign aid lavished on kleptocratic dictators put into power with the help of the CIA during the Cold War. Closer to home, public housing, inner-city public education and many welfare programs failed spectacularly despite budgets in the billions. Does that mean that all social spending is wasteful? Only if the billions Ford wasted on its the Edsel mean that new autobile design is always a losing proposition: money spent wisely provides for better results than money not spent wisely, whether in the public or private sector. Only a person whose opposition to social spending is only predicated on results to mask the unpopular view that government should not be in the business of addressing social ills would make such sweeping statements.

But we knew that already.