As a looney right-winger, most of my political views boil down to whether a service is the people’s responsibility or the government’s. Ninety-nine percent of the time I side with the people — the private market. And then there’s the 1%.
Aside from defense, for obvious reasons, I almost believe the private market is superior to the public sector. I remember a speaker at a Cameron School District Board of Education Trustee requesting the privatization of all extra-curricular activities.
Should it be the taxpayers’ responsibility to fund school sports and activities? If all my political views have a through-line, this is one of those 1% times.
Considering the preponderance of state champions, private schools are superior, because they dedicate a preponderance of money to cultivating athletes.
But in my opinion, state oversight of programs helps establish fairness between competing teams.
If you took all the public programs and made them private, I predict the rules of these programs would slowly erode as they allowed exception after exception as to who could play on what team, etc., until no rules existed.
While still popular today, baseball is no longer “America’s pastime.” Some say it died in popularity due to the 1990’s MLB strike. I believe it died with a cultural shift from municipal recreation programs and public schools to greater emphasis on private, travel ball tournaments.
Championships in Iola still mean something. Iola, after all, is a baseball town. In other areas, if an argument could be made that the league champ is an inferior team to a less regulated travel team then city leagues lose their luster. Entering a childhood friend’s house, seeing his wall of trophies and photos wearing triple-stitched, button-up jerseys no team I ever played for could afford, I saw a different side of baseball.
He was proud of his travel league achievements because these were the best of the best, the carefully curated little league talent. I didn’t know those kids and all his teammates were from another town. They didn’t represent anything or anyone but themselves.
I often hear athletics are dying in America. That’s hyperbole. Sports are not dying, but there seems to be less emphasis on sports. Baseball films used to be No. 1 hits at the box office. Name the last one. I can’t entirely blame privatization, but I feel like it had a role because each time privatization gets involved in public endeavors, overall interest in the endeavor erodes.
Sports has a culture of its own, sports families, whose schedules are predicated around practices and competitions. As AI number-crunches us into oblivion, those entirely separate from sports culture may see the public funds invested in public sports and respond differently from past generations. It may go against 99% of my political values, but maybe taxpayer-funding athletics is a societal good we should not discard to the private market.
